


The Ballad of Lennon and McCartney

by Please_Dont_Wake_Me



Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: "Art Drugs and Mental Illness", (don't get me wrong there's also "Sex" and "Rock n' Roll"), Alternate History (but it's subtle), Alternate Universe - No Beatles, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, the old "John's a painter but Paul still went into music" chestnut but with a twist...
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:09:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 32,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28692237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Please_Dont_Wake_Me/pseuds/Please_Dont_Wake_Me
Summary: “I think that to make real art - like, if you want to tap into the current of what’s really going on, you can’t be fully aware of it. You can’t be all in your head about it. You’re not speakin’ the truth, you’re feeling it - lettin’ it speak through you. You’re taking from the realm of truth and transforming it into something a human can perceive, but you don’t always know what it is.”In late 1966, the baby-faced balladeer Paul McCartney meets an unsuccessful artist named John Lennon at an Avant Garde gala.The ensuing relationship causes him to publicly lose his mind.
Relationships: John Lennon/Paul McCartney
Comments: 32
Kudos: 96





	1. ( A ) Waltz in the Park - 4:34

_“It was like a love affair with a competitive edge.”_

## Part One

## 1966.

  
Paul met him while pretending to understand a piece of art.

“Y’don’t have to act like you get it,” he said in a hard nasal lilt, mostly Kiwi, a little - if Paul was not mistaking it - _Liddypool_. “In fact, it’s a piece’ve fuckin’ trash.”

Paul turned his head to greet the man beside him; a twiggy, unkempt bohemian drowning in an afghan coat and a pair of worn military boots, wild auburn hair stuffed under a newsboy cap. He had his hands shoved in his pockets and was pitched forward an inch, staring at Paul with a furiously intense gaze over the dark frames of his spectacles. Paul actually moved to take a step back - his shoulders turned and his right foot made to pivot; the look hit him in the chest and pinned him to the spot, both at once. The man’s eyes were the same colour as his hair, narrowed to cheshire cat crescents, and he was loudly chewing a wad of gum, open mouthed.

Paul blinked. “Excuse me?”

“You’re not meant to understand it,” he explained, smacking his gum from one side of his mouth to the other. “It’s all a grift; doesn’t mean a damn thing.”

“The piece, or the show?” Paul found himself asking, arching an eyebrow. The stranger raised his brows right back, a thorny grin tugging the corner of his mouth.

“ _Well_ -” and the man slid a step closer, so smooth it felt casual, natural. His shoulder knocked against Paul’s and he slipped a hand out of his pocket to tug at the brim of his cap, leaning in like he was telling a secret. “I was talking about the piece, but you can say it for the show too. Ono, she’s completely batty, y’know? They had her locked up in the nuthouse back in Japan, yeah? That’s why she’s runnin’ her scams in London.”

“And what makes you think it a scam?” Paul kept on asking, setting a hand to his chin. It was unusual, to say the least, to meet someone so forward with their real opinions at a gathering like this, the hippest and richest of the London art scene crammed into the smokey, wooden corridors of the Indica's basement. Not without a few glasses of social lubricant, at least.

The man scoffed, and blew a lock of hair out of his face. “No one makes anything these days ‘cept to provoke a reaction,” he sneered. “S’all a lotta cynical drivel that says nothing, like filling a gallery with mirrors, and she’s the worst of the lot.”

 _A gallery of mirrors_ , Paul hummed a scale to himself, modified it a bit, tucked it away for later. “Isn’t the point of art to provoke a reaction though?”

Moving a bit, Paul thought, like a stray cat, the man seemed to be considering him; pulling a loose hand through his hair in a rather feminine gesture, a contrast to the masculine tilt of his hips and the smokey confidence with which his eyes were raking him up and down. Paul stared back, worrying his bottom lip with a fingernail. Instinctively, he understood that they were evaluating each other, but he had no idea what it was all about.

The stranger knew: “Not the way _they_ mean it,” he said, as if they had not skipped a beat and four measures, and a couple steps on the staircase for that matter. “Take this shite for example: two hundred quid t’see a fuckin’ apple sittin’ on a pedastal? What’s the point of it?”

Paul returned his attention to said apple. “I thought it was meant to represent -” what had he thought? “Decay,” he ventured. “The um, inevitability of it.”

“Oooh yeah? Do y’think the yellow wallpaper represents the domestic sphere too?”

“What?”

“The whole point of it’s to be so baffling that you can say any old thing about it and sound profound! What’s _provocative_ about it’s that the daft cow was sittin’ around thinking about how to get people to think she’s got somethin’ _real_ to say, instead of just _saying_ it! That’s not art, that’s fucking psychology mate. If art were about that, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be framing shite literally and be done with the whole thing!”

“I hadn’t thought to hear a harsh criticism of Duchamp at an avant-garde gala,” Paul retorted playfully.

“It’s all subjective, luv.” The stranger was grinning full-tilt now. “But it should come from inside, yeah?”

“Right - a real artist should be able to offend, simply by being themselves.”

“He gets it!” The man clapped and Paul’s heart leapt with the noise. He realized, presently, how intimately they’d been speaking, how close they’d drifted - shoulder-to-shoulder, the scent of the man’s gum pooling between them, the press and murmur of the crowd tacking them to the velvet rope, their back-and-forth framed in plexiglass like Yoko Ono's confounding art-piece. Paul was rather grateful for it, truth be told; collecting eccentric acquaintances at galas and gatherings like this was one of the perks of fame, and this man was the most interesting person he’d met tonight. He was quietly desperate to know his thoughts.

“So, how does one offend _naturally_? Like a real artist does?”

The man’s hands said a few things before his mouth caught up. Paul’s eyes tracked the dance of his long, knobby fingers, his wide and elegant palms. Whenever he saw someone with hands like that he wanted to set them on a piano, or a guitar. George almost lived and died using his marvellous hands on work that would have destroyed them before he was old.

“It’s like there’s a veil,” the stranger pontificated with a sweeping gesture, all wrist and fingers. “And the veil is fear, and that fear is between the world we live in, and the world of truth, and like, um -” He stuttered - his whole expression blinked, a TV going static. Paul got the impression that he should nod encouragingly, that he had perhaps asked something which made one vulnerable to ridicule in these sorts of circles. The whole interruption took less than a breath, but that sensitivity followed Paul into the rest of the conversation. “- the world of truth is the world of art,” the man continued, “but the world of truth is also the one you _feel_ , y’dig?” 

Paul was already nodding along again. Yes, yes, that’s what he thought too - 

“You can’t overcome fear consciously, so art like this is only painting on the veil, a bunch’a pretentious gits leaving graffiti on the gates of heaven, is what I’m saying -” 

Yes, he got what he was saying. He thought so, at least; felt as if this man had put a period on a sentence he’d spent the past two years agonizing over.

“If you approach it from this dimension of, this posture of, like - where you’re coming at it coldly deliberate-like… it’s bloody arrogance, don’t you think? Trying to tear down that barrier’s like thinking you can control the arc of history.”

Paul waited, lips pursed; this could be going somewhere truly interesting, or the man was about to reveal himself to be another one of those tiresome Marxist Deconstructionists who were cropping up everywhere these days.

“I think that to make real art - like, if you want to tap into the current of what’s _really_ going on, you can’t be fully aware of it. You can’t be -” he tapped his temple, “- all in your head about it. You’re not speakin’ the truth, you’re _feeling_ it - lettin’ it speak through you. You’re taking from the realm of truth and transforming it into something a human can perceive, but you don’t always know what it is.”

“Like alchemy,” Paul offered, turning the metaphor over a few times. _Art and mirrors and incantations… in a gallery where no one can see the truth._

“Like magic, yeah,” the stranger’s smirk softened, blossomed boyish, and he relaxed his shoulders. “S’like how all the Yank musicians are going right now - Dylan and Hendrix and all them. They’re tappin’ into _something_ over there, some kinda Jungian unconscious? But the brits are still rhyming ‘june’ and ‘spoon’. Nothin’ but granny songs, the war’s been over twenty years and the whole fuckin’ island’s still asleep!” As an example, he sung: “ _‘Birds sing out of tune, And rain clouds hide the moon,’_ \- rubbish! Mechanical pop drivel!”

It was a credit to his upbringing - and his thorough media couching - that Paul didn’t flinch. Instead, he said: “Interesting,” and, with a carefully mechanical smile, offered his hand. “Nice to meet you, by the way. I’m Paul McCartney.”

The stranger was caught in the headlights. Feeling mischievous enough to push it, Paul began humming the opening bars of his first hit single. “ _‘Please lock me away’_ ,” he trilled, “ _‘And dooon’t allooow the day’_...” 

“ _‘- here inside’_ ,” the stranger added, “- _‘where I hide with my loneliness’_.” A tad cracked and hesitant at first, but when Paul kept on along with him he crescendo-ed into a full camp falsetto that had the posh woman sipping wine askance them shooting off a dirty look: “ _‘I don’t care what they say’, I won’t stay in a wooooorld without love’_!”

That had them both going - _deep_ , sincere laughter, the kind that punched Paul in the gut and had him near doubling over. The stranger was grabbing his right hand, encasing it in his warm, calloused palms. He looked Paul directly in the eye when he introduced himself. “John Lennon.”

Paul looked back, took in the details he hadn’t noticed before: the hawkish aquiline nose, the raised mole between his wispy, stormcloud eyebrows. He was like a character in a French Existentialist novel, Paul thought; what he always imagines those superstar philosophers - Satre, Camus, or whoever - will look like before he flips the book over. “Are you a music critic, _Monsieur_ Lennon?” he inquired from behind his other hand, still snickering.

“Nah, I’m an artist.” Lennon threw both palms in the air. “Actually, the ‘artist’ part is rather theoretical. I “make” “art”, but me art don’t fucking sell, and art that doesn’t sell in this fascist economy doesn’t _fuckin’ count as art_.” 

And then - still looking Paul straight in the eye - Monsieur Lennon spit out his gum, snatched the apple off its plexiglass podium, and took a gigantic bite. Cu- _ruuuunch_ went the the two hundred quid art-piece, so juicy and decidedly un-decayed that Lennon’s demonic grin was wet with it.

Paul’s eyes went wide. At this point, he did not care if the man was a Marxist Deconstructionist. This was the most fascinating conversation he’d had in -

“At least art that doesn’t sell can’t be part of the grift,” he pointed out coyly.

Lennon made a dark noise in the back of his throat, both bitter and impressed, and took another bite of the apple. “Well, don't let it be said I’ve not sold out to buy me weekly butter."

“Then you’re an artist in the same sense that I’m a musician, I s’pose,” Paul replied, unbidden. He has no idea what he meant by that, and he has no idea what the look Lennon gives him when he says it is supposed to mean either. 

“S’pose so. Ya had the temerity t’do it under your real name and everything.”

“Maybe you missed your true calling,” he interjected before Lennon could say anything else about the other thing. “As a critic, I mean. Any english music you do like?”

Lennon crossed his arms, gestured with his chin. “I like this.”

 _Face to Face_ by the Kinks, a newly pressed vinyl playing faintly from another room. “I do too,” Paul nodded. Then, he pointed out: “I chose the music for today’s gala.”

Lennon’s expression remained cool. “It’s not their best though, is it?” he mused, something hard edged in his voice.

Paul didn’t back down. “I suppose not, but I like what it’s doing.”

“And what’s it _‘doing’_?”

Paul rolled his wrist as he spoke, opposite hand wrapped around his elbow. “It’s not ‘Peter and the Wolf’ or whatever, but the songs are arranged thoughtfully, don’t you think?”

Lennon managed to look _down_ at him, all smug up behind his imperial nose, 'though he was about half an inch shorter. Paul continued: “I’ve always wanted to make an album like that, I guess, that tells a story. More ambitious than this one is, of course - with leitmotifs, and such, like in proper music.”

“What’s stoppin’ you?” Lennon asked. Brusquely and immediately, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Paul was stunned silent by the question. There were _so_ many reasons, and all of them set his stomach knotting and his fingers twitching into fists. The sound of Lennon’s sloppy chewing filled their bubble, drowned out the noise of the crowd moving around them.

“You make it sound easy,” Lennon continued. “Like if you only sat down and did it you could pop out a conceptual- kinda album better than this when the thing you’re most famous for is rhymin’ ‘yesterday’ with ‘far away’. So why don’t you do it?”

Paul bristled. “I... didn’t mean to sound arrogant.”

Lennon’s wicked trickster grin returned, only this time Paul felt like he was in on the joke. “I wasn’t complainin’.” He set the half-eaten apple back on its podium, then dug two ciggies out of his pocket, clipped them between his lips to light them up. Upon exhale, he handed one to Paul. “Well, c’mon then.”

“Hm?” Paul tipped his head, cigarette on his teeth. 

“I owe you a drink for slaggin’ off your music like that, don’t I?”

Paul drummed the smoke along his bottom lip a few times, as if he was really thinking it over. “That’s two you owe me for, then. For the crack about ‘Yesterday’.”

“I thought ‘We Can Work it Out’ was shite too.”

“Three.”

“ ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ had potential, but the opening line’s a stinker.”

“That's worth a shot at least.”

“I could keep goin’, but they call us _starving_ artists for a reason.”

“I’ll cover the fifth if you tell me how’d you fix ‘I Saw Her Standing There’.”

Lennon pressed his cigarette to his mouth, the whole veiny root system of his hand curved around his jaw. Smirking through the smoke, he said: “In that case, son, I’ve got linear notes on the whole discography.”

\--

He dragged Paul a brisk walk through Piccadilly to _The Dog and Duck_ , and the whole time they discussed the year’s albums - the man hadn’t heard _Pet Sounds_ yet (horrendous!), but his thoughts on _Blonde on Blonde_ were invaluable. He had, also, heard a suspicious number of Paul’s own top forty hits, considering all he’d been on about back at the gallery. It was several more than five drinks when he deigned to give Paul the linear notes.

“She was just seventeen,” Lennon proclaimed, slamming his beer on the table, “y’know _what I mean_.”

“That’s it?” Paul wondered, sipping his own brew rather more conservatively. 

“Try it out.”

Paul twirled the neck of the bottle between two fingers, aware that he was pouting. But he obeyed; hummed out the new line, and was appalled to find that - 

“See?”

“It rolls off the tongue, you’re right.”

“Now try it like this -” Lennon started drumming a be-bop beat off the table, rattling their platoon of discarded glasses. “You could even dance t’it. Be-bop a lua -”

 _A-whomp-bam-boom_ , Paul’s brain finished. He grabbed his drink - _and_ Lennon’s - to stop them from rattling straight to the floor. “That’s how I wrote it originally, you know.”

“Seriously?”

Paul nodded, smiling into the collar of his coat. “Yeah, a little rockabilly. But more like -” He drummed out his own counter-beat, and Lennon’s quickly fell in line. E7, A7, B7, E - ah, _that_ was it. They were sat diagonally across from each other, knees knocking, claiming a corner for themselves at the booth nearest the loo, tilted close so they could hear each other above the booming bass of the radio, the chorus at the bar where a grainy, hand-held telly was showing the news in flickering bursts of black and grey: trouble in America, trouble in Indochina. What a terrible thing, to offer nothing more ambitious than a mirror to a world such as this. When Paul caught his drinking companion’s eye, he could swear they were thinking the same chords.

“Well? Give us a show, luv,” Lennon prompted, adding a clap on every off-beat. “A-one, two, three -”

Paul took a deep breath: “ _‘Well she was just seventeen’-_ ” 

“That’s right, baby.”

“- _‘you know what I mean’_ -”

“I do, I do,”

“- _‘and the way she looked was way beyond compare, sssoooo’_ -”

“ _‘How could I dance with another’_ -” Lennon chimed in, half an octave lower and in imperfect harmony, “ _‘when I saw her standing there_!”

When they laughed, Lennon’s voice went down and Paul’s went up, behind his nose, and the same thing happened when they sang. The vocal lock was so consummate that it reverberated in every one of Paul’s bones; he’d never had a harmony that good on any of his records, not even when he brought in George or one of their old mates in for a session. He looked at Lennon, who was rosy-cheeked and smiling so broad it might crack his face open. The grin could’ve been shit-eating, very _‘oh I told you so, you humdrum straight’_ , but there wasn’t a hint of self satisfaction in it. Usually, Paul balked at edits, suggestions, critique - all of which were uniformly wont to make his songs worse - but that hadn’t been _criticism_ ; it was what he’d wished the song sounded like in the first place.

“It’s slightly, um,” Paul rubbed his nose. “Forward, though.”

Lennon was already rolling his eyes. “Don’t tell me y’talk to -” he paused, took a sip of beer. “- _birds_ the same way you write.”

“‘Course not.”

“So why write songs that way?”

Paul slumped in his seat, realizing that he had no good answer for that. “Are you a songwriter in your spare time, then?” he asked blearily, glowering from under his eyelashes.

“Er, a… a bit I guess...” Lennon’s shoulders drew up tight, like they’d been when he first approached him. “When I was a kid. Had me a guitar in 1956, so like every other boy I wanted t’be Elvis.”

“Before he sold out,” Paul added automatically. An old singer’s fisherman tale, never heeded.

“Fuckin’ right.”

“Why’d you stop?” Paul pushed forward, chin on the heel of his palm and fingertips grazing his jaw. The lighting of the venue had Lennon turning all pink and ghost blue, sinking into the insomniac bruises beneath his eyes, yellowy-and-pale with the red highlights in his hair catching blaze. There were subtleties to this conversation happening beneath the words. John Lennon told Paul that he’d grown up mostly in New Zealand, but it was the blackness of his eyes and the way his fingers clung together that said there was something terribly tragic and exciting behind the story. He liked the idea of his new acquaintance fumbling around the C-chord on the other side of the world at the same time Paul was tucked away in the top room at Forthlin Lane, writing the first draft of that creaky old granny song he hated so much; listening to the same records, thinking the same things about them, but taking that inspiration in such different directions. It felt significant somehow.

“Eh -” Lennon brushed his hair behind one ear, scowling. “Couldn’t sing, couldn’t write, couldn’t play. Didn’t have the -” he reached out to poke Paul in the nose, “- face for it.”

Paul scrunched up his nose and bounced back like Lennon’s fingertip was scalding hot. 

“Honestly, sometimes I wish I didn’t.”

Lennon gave him a funny look.

“The face for it, I mean.” Paul ran a hand along his jaw. “Wish I didn’t have it.”

“Didn’t they put you in magazines?” Lennon pried. “All the little girlies calling your name?”

“How long can that last? If I’m being candid, I always hoped I’d make it a,” (lot) “- _bit further_ than Elvis. Not that I made it even that far.”

Paul was shocked by what he’d said. He must have looked it too, because Lennon’s expression only got more inscrutable. He tipped his beer to his lip and took a long drink, not once breaking eye contact. “Is that so.”

Was it so? Paul’s hands were flat on the table, resting as if splayed across piano keys. In the boozy blue light he could see all the notes of his butchered songs sinking into the black shadows pooling around his knuckles. The hill he told himself he was climbing to finally make the kind of music he wanted was getting taller all the time, yet here he was still pushing that old boulder.

Well, that couldn’t be true. Paul was only twenty-four, after all, and besides - keeping his goals realistic was the only reason he’d gotten where he was today. It was unlikely anyone would be as famous as Elvis ever again, nor should that be the point. Like he was always telling Jane: it was about the music, not the swimming pools.

Lennon was still staring at him, as if he really expected an answer. Paul opened his mouth, but was interrupted by a shadow falling across their table.

“John Lennon.”

Lennon’s head whipped around and Paul followed the angle of his sudden, frantic gaze. Towering above them was a diminutive woman of east-Asian descent, dressed for a funeral, a sliver of a severe, majestically granite face shimmering under the lowlights, half-hidden by her cascading, crow-black hair. By process of elimination Paul assumed that this must be Yoko Ono.

“I know it was you,” she said sweetly.

Paul held out a hand. “Good evening, Miss Ono. I really enjoyed the show.”

“Ignore her,” Lennon said, turning away.

Yoko Ono’s eyes slid towards Paul, body following with the grace of sand being pulled out by the tide. “He’s not supposed to be here,” she informed him. Her accent was tinged notably American, practically talking up between-the-eyes like New Yorkers did. “Don’t believe he doesn’t know who you are. He’s always stalking my shows, always looking for some cat to buy him a drink.”

Paul raised an eyebrow. “S’that true?”

Lennon sighed, performatively. “I knew who _fuckin’_ Paul McCartney was, Christ. I didn’t know _you_ were Paul McCartney.”

“No, that you were using me to get past the bouncer.”

“Ah,” and he had the decency to look sheepish. “Don’t pout, McCharmly, I didn’t pluck you out by accident.”

Paul’s eyebrow had not levelled yet. He wondered if this John Lennon fellow had any clue how absurdly charismatic he was. He must’ve - after all, Paul was the person he’d wanted to buy him a drink tonight, and here Paul was: having just bought him multiple drinks. After what he’d implied about the manipulative character of Miss Ono’s art earlier, it was pretty rich.

But Paul didn’t mind. It was flattering, to have the most interesting person in the room think the same thing about you.

“I _know_ it was you,” Ono repeated.

“Oh,” and Paul set two fingers to his mouth. “The apple.”

“What is your problem?” she demanded.

“I was just _engaging with the piece_ , darling,” but Lennon was looking at Paul when he said all this. “See, if her work’s about trust, then I was contributing to the meaning of it by showing how you can’t _trust_ a hungry man to resist a free meal.”

“I see,” Paul nodded. “Then you’ve turned it into protest piece, about the state of the economy.” It’s not that Paul was trying to make fun of her, but he couldn’t resist the riff.

“And you’re continuing the performance by providing a broke man the temporary ambrosia of drunkenness. Charity and art all at once! If that ain’t the dream of the bourgeoisie!” 

“I guess it’s settled then.”

“Nothing has been settled,” Yoko Ono said, which was technically true. Feeling fuzzy from drink and good company, and eager to end the conflict on a reasonable note, Paul dug out his chequebook.

“Miss Ono, let me make it up to y -”

Lennon grabbed Paul by the arm and yanked him 'round so that they were face to face in the tight corner of the booth. “I _told_ you to pay her no mind."

“John,” she said, firmly.

“You _did_ eat her apple…”

“It was there for the eating. 'Sides - that’s not what she’s steamed about, trust me.”

“ _John_ ,” she purred, so low it slipped beneath the bass booming from the speakers underfoot. Paul did her the courtesy of a glance, but Lennon kept shaking his head.

“ _Anyroad_ ,” and there it was again, a hint of the North in him, “- weren’t you about to tell me about that new song you’re workin’ on?” 

“Was I?” Paul echoed back, airily. Neither of them were drunk enough to believe such a conversation actually happened, but that’s not what Lennon was asking.

“Yeah, the one wit’ the -” and he mimed bashing a keyboard, hummed a couple incoherent notes.

“Joooohn,” Yoko Ono added.

Paul rarely shared his in-progress music. There wasn’t anyone to share it with, besides his producers; Jane didn’t really get it, his father was still in Liverpool, and nothing good had come in the past from sharing too many songs with George.

“Actually,” and Paul _“played”_ the opening to a ditty he’d been toying with all week. “It went like this.” He hummed it. Then he kept going. _Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been, hm, hmmm, la, da, di, la, la, la._

“John, _John, Joooohnn, John, John_ ,” went Miss Ono’s breathy accompaniment. She set her small hands on the edge of the table and curved forward.

John John Jooooohnnn Lennon fished a bent cigarette from his pocket and lit it on the candle flickering above the booth, eyes flashing amber in the haze. “Pretty, but a little thin.”

“Thin?”

“Lean, no fat. Some lonely bint in a church, then she dies? What else? What’s it all about, McCartney?”

“It’s obvious what it’s about,” Paul replied stiffly. 

“ _Jooooohn_. Joo _ooooo_ oohnnnn.” Ono was experimenting with tones now.

“You’re supposed to juxtapose the music and the story, to see what’s not being said.” It really was very obvious.

“Jooooo _ooooooooohnnn_!”

Lennon made an extremely rude noise with his nose. “That’s no good.”

With unflinching boldness not usually seen in a woman, Yoko Ono swept aside the fleet of empty glasses they had amassed over the course of the night and climbed onto the table.

“Er-?” Paul said.

Lennon took a leisurely drag off his smoke and resolutely continued to pay her no mind. “If you’re looking for the audience to fill in th’ gaps,” he murmured, tone liquid and deeply personal somehow, gaze so intense and unwaveringly fixed on him that Paul couldn’t help but ignore her too. “- they’ll end up using whatever boring shit’s already in their head. That’s why you’re the writer, and they’re the listeners.”

Paul frowned. “You think so?”

“Sure, the whole point is that you gotta have a perspective. What d’ _you_ think loneliness is? What d’ _you_ think fate means? The job of the artist’s to make them think something new.”

“To see past their veils of truth?” Paul appended softly. He felt like he was a glass ball hanging on a thread, and like his strange new friend was holding a pair of very large scissors. Perhaps he was drunker than he’d thought, the whole scene taking on a rather dreamlike quality, all quicksilver and unreal. Ono was crawling towards them, light as the reflection of moonlight on still water, and John Lennon had sidled in so close that he had to brace a hand on Paul’s knee to keep upright. 

“Tell me, Paul McCartney -” The candle’s reflection was chasing itself around and around inside the pools of Lennon’s spectacles. “What’s on the other side of yours?”

There was nowhere else to look but at him, his long, sharp features blinkered in the dusky shroud of cigarette smoke. At some point they had passed beyond the veil in real life, and didn’t Lennon say that you can’t always know what it is you’re bringing back from the other side?

“I -” Paul breathed at the same time Yoko Ono picked up an empty bottle, set it to Lennon’s ear, and shrieked his name at the top of her lungs.

“Are ya _trying to pop me fucking eardrums you unhinged bat_!” he shrieked back, and promptly: the spell was broken. With a smile so subtle it might have all been Paul’s imagination, Yoko set the bottle down and poured herself off the table like mercury.

“I told you, John,” she said cryptically, a rebuttal in some argument Paul would never be privy to. For a moment, Lennon’s full attention was on her, and he went white as a sheet.

So:

It _did_ turn out that he - one John Lennon, esquire - was not supposed to be there; not in _The Dog and Duck_ , _or_ the Indica for that matter. And so: impulsively, Paul decided to leave with him - short-breathed and giggling, through the back exit by the kitchen which patrons were not permitted to use, not having bothered to say his goodbyes to Barry at the galley, who had invited him, or checking in with Jane’s brother, who might've been expecting him somewhere else in an hour. There were low clouds rolling over the Tower, sheets of fog on the river. Between the cracks, the stars were burning brighter than the street below. Something inside was telling him that he should play this conversation out to its natural conclusion.

“She’s a fuckin’ witch - I swear to you, McCartney, she’s been stuffing me mailbox full of hexes for months now.” Lennon blew into his hands, breath misting in the crisp, November air.

“You’ve had her then?”

“Don’t even joke, mate.” Lennon made a show of shivering from head to toe.

Paul was not convinced. “There’s no reason a bird should hate you that much otherwise.”

Lennon hesitated, chewing the side of his mouth. After a moment, he jerked his chin towards the mouth of the alley, gesturing for Paul to walk with him. 

“It’s her career she thinks I fucked,” he explained vaguely.

“How’s that?” Paul asked as they turned onto the street.

“Thinks I scalped a patron off her.”

“Did you?”

“If I did, they’d’ve been my patron by now. Do I _look_ like I have them?” Lennon waved over his ratty clothes with demonstrative vigour. Both legs of his jeans had holes in the knee.

“No.”

“There’s your answer.”

“But did you have _them_?” Paul teased.

Lennon’s eyes rounded out, like he didn’t get the joke. Do I really come off that square, Paul wondered? But it passed quickly and they were laughing in synch again. “That’s how all the _artistes_ did it in _ye olden days_ ,” Lennon sung that part, in the style of an obnoxious radio personality. “Down on me knees, under the table. Not much different from what you do, really.”

Paul chose to ignore that. “What sort of under the table work got you banned from the Indica?”

Lennon shoved his hands in his pocket. “Tried to sell ‘em a piece of art.”

Another mystery to tuck away behind the filing cabinet. Lennon dug around in his coat, and produced a fag and lighter. Paul was gesturing for a puff before he finished lighting up.

“You smoke grass?” Lennon wondered, a tad bewildered, and then the smell hit Paul.

That he started coughing was answer enough. “Uh, couple of me mates do,” he stammered, pinned by Lennon’s amused smile. “Sometimes.”

“ ‘Me mates!’ he says!”

Paul waved the smoke out of his face. “H-hey, I grew up on the Mersey y’know. Should you be smoking that in the middle of the road?”

Lennon ignored the second thing to pounce on the first: “What a coincidence! I was born in Liverpool too!” The _"was"_ came out closer to _"warse"_ , as if to underscore.

“Explains the accent.” Paul couldn’t tuck away his delighted grin. It _was_ a coincidence, and _what_ a _one_. Paul wasn’t generally taken with the astrology craze sweeping the subcultures - signs and portents, and all that; he was one always determined to go his own way. But this - what was this? A meeting that was meant to happen? Long diverted? Paul was drunk, _and bright are the stars that shine, dark is the sky and the mischief moving under the current of John Lennon’s Cheshire Cat eyes_ ; and maybe a little stoned too, already, from inhaling that smoke. Permit him to think _some_ thing about it.

Even though there was conversation on the other side of the street, although a car surged past them, then another, outlining them with misty headlights, Paul reached out and snatched the joint from Lennon’s lips. He took a deep hit, held it for probably too long. Definitely too long, if the jaunty dance Lennon’s mouth was doing was anything to go by. Comically long, perhaps.

He was hacking before he exhaled.

“You’ll get used to it,” Lennon promised with a chuckle, slapping him on the back. “C’mon. Let’s go wandering.”

They spent about eighteen hours merrily exploring St. James’s Park. Only a slight under-estimation, Paul supposed, made by his neophyte drug brain. The second twenty-six hours of those eighteen were spent explicitly looking for the exit, but they kept each other entertained by quoting their favourite _Goon Show_ skits, which inevitably waylaid them in a fierce duel to determine whose _Goon_ knowledge was more freakishly complete.

A duel Lennon easily won. “Don’t worry,” he said, flicking Paul in the forehead. “Just means I’ve spent more time lazing around on me arse.”

To escape the park, they were forced to hop a fence. Lennon grabbed two pikes and vaulted over the top like a madman, a tumbling ball of yellow corduroy and ratty trousers. Once again a stray cat: he landed on his feet, and ambled himself upright drunkenly. Grinned drunkenly too. “McCartney,” he demured, wheeling about, all fake-gentleman. He made a show of offering of his clasped hands through the bars to give Paul a boost.

Paul leant in and cupped both palms around his mouth. “ _Jooooohnnnn_!!!” he stage whispered, a near-perfect imitation of Yoko’s glass-shattering wail.

John dropped him on the pavement, they were both laughing so hard. It must have been late; there were no cars, no one around. The fog had crawled into the streets, which were bathed in the firefly glow of veiled streetlamps. The veil of truth, Paul thought, it hasn’t lifted yet. They halved another joint and John relayed to him a long, rambling - and naturally, riveting - story about him and his old gang ( _literal?_ ) squatting a summer in some old Colonial estate that’d been slated for demolition. His mate Derrick, y’see - and they all told him the date they had to be out by so it was no one to blame - well he got the date wrong and was asleep on the top floor when the wrecking ball rolled up. The thing is: other than that, Dunedin was so _fuuuucking boring_ a man could go mad. He really could. 

“No choice except t’cause trouble,” Paul agreed.

“Yeah?” John nudged him with an elbow. “I bet you were a good kid. Mind your p’s and q’s, got your A-levels and all that.”

“I wasn’t good or bad,” Paul answered matter of factly.

“Oh, when'd you become _so darn-ed angelic_ , then? Our gentle, baby faced, _Mellow McCartney_?”

Paul looked away, still matter of fact. “I’m not as good as all that,” he said quietly, and swayed to a stop. John followed suit, holding himself carefully. They’d drifted near his neighbourhood, Paul noticed, and the conversation had drifted to something approaching a choke point.

Except that when he raised his chin to meet Lennon’s intrigued gaze, Paul _felt_ that the current was still going, an ebb and flow of engagement tugging them in the same direction for a little while longer.

“Say, why don’t you come back to mine?”

Both of John’s eyebrows went straight to the hairline, disappeared beneath his cap. Paul tipped his head to one side and waited him out. He wasn’t sure why _he_ was the one waiting on the approval of this odd man who’d apparently been banned from every major art venue in the city, but there it was.

“Uh,” John scratched his ear nervously, curiously subdued. “Sure, mate.”

He was quiet as Paul let him into his home. Paul: clicked the foyer lights on, lit the kitchen, put on a kettle. “You can leave your coat anywhere, I don’t keep a cleaner,” he chirped when he noticed John was uncomfortable. He didn’t think his townhouse was _so_ showy, but Lennon had said a number of things over the course of the night to imply that his current place of residence was not necessarily paid for, nor legal. He didn’t want the man to think he was rubbing it in his face.

When he brought out the tea, John was still standing at the mouth of the hall, cheeks ruddy, hair curling from the humidity, looking deeply conflicted.

“Er, McCartney. Look -”

Paul pushed a cup into his frigid hands. “Come with me.”

John raised his face slowly, eyes wide, and nodded once. Paul led him upstairs to the music room, left him to linger in the doorway as he set his tea on the windowsill and thumbed through his record collection, whistling the open strains of ‘Wouldn’t it be Nice’ as he went. “Ah, here we go.”

He spun to his feet and presented the sleeve of _Pet Sounds_ for John’s approval.

Lennon’s face was hidden in the shadow cast by the hall, but Paul could tell his expression was more bemused than _a_ mused. There was a tick of silence between them - quivering like the skin of a half-cooked egg, tense with some energy Paul couldn’t place - before John strode into the room, one ginger step at a time, an ambiguous slant to his head, lips twitching like a livewire.

“You dragged me halfway down the bloody Thames,” he exclaimed, voice hoarse. “- t’listen to the _bleedin’ Beach Boys_!?”

\--

Yet a few hours later Paul was laying on his back with his acoustic guitar slung ‘cross his stomach, strumming away, and John Lennon was laying opposite of him - their ears an inch apart - singing at the top of his lungs. He’d coaxed John into belting out Smokey's ‘You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me’, for no other reason than that he thought he might sound good doing it.

“ _‘Oh, oh, oh, wanna a banana split now, I can’t quit now’_ -”

His grasp on the lyrics could use some work though.

“ _‘You really got a hoooooooooold on meeeeee’_ ,” John crooned, voice cracking at a pitch that went straight through the heart. A knife that didn’t hurt. Paper being crumpled in a closed fist. Something like that; there was a quality to it, tender and ineffable.

“Bull you can’t sing, you lying arse,” Paul observed generously.

“So you’re deaf. Explains why your music sounds the way it does.”

“I’m serious. Your voice, it’s very, hm,” Paul plucked a few chords to illustrate what he meant. “It’s natural, is all. Seems like y’ _feel_ the music.” John matched his scale, yowling like a cat being tortured in an alley. Paul flailed a hand out blindly, attempted to whack him in the side of the head. “Stop that!” he scolded, and missed by about the width of a football field.

“He’s not deaf, ladies and gentlemen!” John shouted, rolling out a ringmaster-esque salute with his long, pointy arms. “The man is _stoned beyond all rational thought_!”

A door slammed at the end of the hallway.

“Paul?”

Paul snapped to sitting. There was Jane: standing in the door, her coat still on, an umbrella dangling off one delicate arm, early-morning mist all clung to her tangerine hair in an aura. She had that look on her face, the perfectly blank one she used when she was assessing a situation and hadn’t decided yet how to feel about it.

“Peter missed you last night,” she said. “Is everything okay?” Her nostrils were flaring, but she was doing her best to remain composed.

Oh, Paul realized, the entire room absolutely reeked of marijuana, and he had been expected by Peter Asher and company at _The Art's Club_ after the show. These factors taken into consideration, the whole scene must have looked rather odd to dearest Jane.

John rose with the grandeur of the Mummy from the crypt. “Ah, there she is,” he crowed, far too bright and bubbly for whatever ungodly hour of the morning they’d passed by. “The famous movie actress!”

Jane reacted with a very mild, crane-like tilt of the neck. She wasn’t _that_ famous. “Who’s this?” she asked Paul.

Good question. Acquaintance? Friend? Barmy foreigner whom Paul was now obligated to give a writing credit on his next single? “This is John Lennon,” he settled on. “Met him at the show. He’s -” and John stifled a laugh, just barely, as if he knew where Paul was going with it, “- a _friend_ of the arist.”

"Aye," John agreed, smile all secrets and teeth. "A friend of the artist!"

Jane examined Paul under the microscope of her gaze. “Have you been up all night?”

Paul yawned in response.

“Want a prellie?” John asked conversationally, producing an Altoids tin from his trouser pocket.

“A what?”

“Uh - nevermind.” John - still in his coat and boots - bounced to his feet, a coiled spring unfurled. He popped a mint from the tin and stretched at the ceiling. “ _Weeee-heeee-eeeelll_ ,” he groaned, voice creaky as his popped joints, “it’s time, I fear, to take me leave of the _beautiful people_ before all this finery turns me square.” He mimed a bow to Paul: “Sir McCartney -” and a curtsey to Jane, “Ms. Asher, a delight, I assure you.” And then, as abruptly as he’d disrupted Paul’s evening, he was gone.

Jane dipped on her heel and watched him disappear down the stairs. “He’s an artist you said?”

“Not in this fascist economy,” Paul shrugged, smiling dumbly to himself. The man hadn’t even left a phone number! Ah - what an absurd confluence of serendipity; Paul’s head was filled with music, more than usual: notes and trills and arpeggios, growing branches and winding together bramble-tight. Even when Jane coaxed a cup'a chamomile into him and put him to bed, he was kept alive and fresh by it, humming in his sleep.

“You’ve been quiet today,” Jane noted over dinner.

“I’m thinking,” he mumbled, pressing the tines of his fork to his bottom lip.

“A new song?”

Paul nodded, absently. “Mm. And about the conversation I had with that John Lennon chap last night.”

“A conversation, was it?”

“Huh?”

Jane shaved a layer from her chicken breast with educated elegance. “I’d thought maybe you were -” she paused, searching for the terminology. “Well, you know what I mean.”

Oh - she meant “doing” “something”, “some” “ _thing_ ” stronger than a little grass. Paul waved the thought away, literally, with a judicious swing of his knife. “No, no, we just talked.”

 _For an eternity_. He’d met John Lennon around six PM, and they’d parted ways at eight in the morning. He and Jane talked for five hours uninterrupted on their first date, which Paul took as an unprecedented sign of compatibility at the time. What did it all mean? A life-changing chance encounter? An entire life's worth of friendship, acted out over the course of an evening? The conversation was playing on repeat inside his skull, around and around, a record that never needs turning over, grinding vinyl to bone. There were _things_ sparking off in there, new ideas, about art, about life, about the world. Paul couldn’t put them into words, he could only write a song about it. _Eleanor Rigby sits in a church, trapped in a mirror, face in a glass, a hall with no truth, hm, hmm, hmmmm_. What is loneliness? A world where the mirror has nothing to show you but your own face? 

He brought it to the studio four days later.

“ ‘Lo George.” He nodded when George swept in, guitar slung over the shoulder and trails of his coat dripping wet from the early November rain. 

" 'Lo, Paul."

“Got something new. Think you might like this one.”

George peaked one of those long, foreboding eyebrows, curiosity lighting his face. Lately, he’d been getting session gigs on the kind of tracks he was actually interested in so strumming backup to Paul’s mouldering ballads was something of a favour these days, Paul supposed, in deference to their brotherly relationship. His old friend was famously tight-lipped, slow boil, still waters, all that. More Liverpool than the Mersey herself.

“Play it, then,” George said.

So Paul played it. Shut his eyes and let it spool out by itself. Playing into an empty studio was like dropping ink in water: the notes diffused in the air, melted against the dampened walls. Lingered around them in wisps of faint, blurry colour. It 'd been a minute since Paul wrote a song that felt like this, felt like it existed before he ever thought of it, in some distant, ancestral memory of the human race.

“So? What'd you think?” he asked after.

“Sounds nothing like you,” George observed.

Paul’s smile went all the way to his toes. With an impish wink, he replied: “I know.”

\- and thank fucking _God_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [A World Without Love](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke4hgo43JGc&ab_channel=PeterandGordon-Topic)   
>  [Face to Face](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TECF4aQyMYw&ab_channel=MazNourII)   
>  [Wouldn't it be Nice](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y44BJgkdZs&ab_channel=TheBeachBoys-Topic)   
>  [You've Really Got a Hold on Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRd-bjFfjNc&ab_channel=TheMiracles-Topic)


	2. ( B1 ) Spiral Staircase - 3:02

## 1967.

He didn’t think too much about John Lennon until he saw him again. 

Of course - he also thought about him constantly: every time he wet his thumb to seal a spliff, and every time he heard the bridge in ‘Eleanor Rigby’ played back to him: lumbering and discordant, just on the edge of _chaotic_ , but! - not a note out of place. Jane was off auditioning in America, two weeks consecutive this time past, nary a moment spent lending an ear to Paul’s opinion on the whole matter, but meanwhile his new album was flowing out of him in droves, in waves, in endless spirals of melody and meter, daring him to paint a landscape around it, to catch it in strands, in glittering handfuls and watery smudges.

Which is to say - he’d an odd sort of faith that his path would inevitably intersect with Lennon’s once more. It was about four months later that he and George rounded the corner to their favourite pub and nearly ran him over: instantly recognizable in that ratty corduroy coat and newsboy cap; today, in matching green paisley, and striped pants rolled up to show his checkered socks, the fraying tongue of a pair of worn-out All-Stars. 

“It’s you!” Lennon exclaimed, throwing out his knobby arms.

“It’s _you!_ ” Paul exclaimed back, but darkly - wagging an accusatory finger. John pointed at himself as well, faking scandal.

“A travesty! Should we really be seen together? So soon?”

“So soon after what?”

“After commitin’ the crime of the century, mate!”

“A crime, was it?” Paul curled a knuckle to his lip to hide his brewing smile. “Thought we were enhancing the piece?”

“The crime was that we committed _art_ in a _gallery_ , McCartney, s’illegal these days, carrying on that way.”

“Til’ it sells, at least.”

They both burst out laughing.

“It’s who in the what now?” George wondered tartly.

Paul grabbed Lennon by the arm and pulled him out of the way of a passing paperboy’s cart. In a warmer country, it’d be siesta; London was still blistering in March, so they settled for Happy Hour. “Ah -” he pat John on the arm. “George, this is _Monsieur_ John Lennon, professional artist and music _critique extraordinaire_.”

“ _Monsieur_ Lennon, is it?”

“ _Professeur_ , if you’d like.”

“ _Ça ne casse pas trois pattes à un canard_ ,” Lennon slurred in a truly awful, but deeply compelling French, accent. “ _Signor_ McCartney.”

Paul snickered, and did a satirical bow. “ _Signore_ Lennon.”

John doubled the depth of the bow, in both physical overreach and level of satirical punch. “ _Senor_ McCartney.”

“Comrade Lennon,” Paul nodded, with a salute.

Still bowing, John dropped to one knee. “Sir McCartney,” he pronounced, in perfect stage voice, his auburn cat-eyes as hypnotic in daylight as they’d been under a lamp.

“ _Herr_ Lennon.” Paul offered his hand, with a carefully observed restraint. 

John accepted, and was pulled to his feet. “McCartney- _san_.” 

“Don’t recognize that one.” Paul rubbed his nose. John’s gaze followed the motion of his finger back to his eyes.

“It’s Japanese, cuz," and Paul started laughing again.

“ ‘Sure y’can hear me all right?” He cupped his hands to John’s ear and took a deep breath -

“ _Don’t!_ ” Lennon yelped, and jumped about a foot in the air. “Oh, they say you’re cute, McCartney, but -”

“Who says I’m cute?”

“How long’ve you two been mates, then?” George cut in. Paul felt like he was being pulled out of a dream, having to assess the aims of his friend’s trenchant inquisition. He met John Lennon six months ago, he made to say, but that wasn’t right -

“We’ve met once,” John said wickedly. He threw an arm around Paul’s shoulder, and the other around George’s. “And now you’ve met me once too, Georgie-boy!” - which was about as good as inviting himself in.

The pub was near-empty and mercifully free of sport. They nursed fizzy scotch in a round booth, beneath a fat, orange window at least as old as the Great London Fire. Paul was spinning his drink nervously and trying not to show it. George could be… _prickly_. Charmingly so, Paul thought, from inside their friendship, under the blanket of his caustic - but thoughtfully given - loyalty. But he had a great talent for not getting on with anyone he didn’t care to get on with. That was why he and George set aside a Thursday every fortnight like this, ‘cause he didn’t care much for Jane and Peter’s friends. And John appeared to be the much same. And John _was_ -

Well:

John was sat between him and George, where the booth curved, with a pointy knee drawn up to his chin and a grin long and sharp as a knife, hair going everywhere on a crisp afternoon. He was smoking with the ember turned palm ward, pressing his knuckles to his teeth every time he took a drag. The light buzzed around him as he and George talked Hendrix and Chuck Berry and Hank Williams, John’s nasal lilt coaxing George’s brogue to cant above the level of radio drone. 

“I’ve been writing with fingerpicking lately,” George admitted, eyes cast knees-ward, rolling the back of his hand ‘cross the dark wood of the pub table. Paul worried that the face he was making leant a bit sour. He’d been composing with folk and world music lately, and George hadn’t said any such thing to him. Then John was asking if he’d heard that Kenyan song - ‘Masanga’, and George was nodding - when had he? His old friend, George from Liverpool?

Of course, Paul realized, here is an artist with a - how did he put it? With a _perspective?_ He’d brought it out in Paul, s’only natural that he’d bring it out in everyone he met. Rather presumptuous, to think yourself so close to someone you’ve met only once. Paul only heard half the conversation; his other ear was listening to the bassline of ‘Mellow Yellow’ slouching across the floorboards like molasses, the tone in the rectangles of honey-orange light scattered through the bottles behind the counter, the space humming between John’s flighty storytelling and George’s dry baritone. Embarrassing, really, how much prophecy he’d applied to that night. He supposed that was the effect of marijuana: it’d only been his first time, after all.

“- don’t y’think so, McCartney?”

“Huh?” Lennon was suddenly an inch or so from his face.

“How d’you stand it? A couple of scouse boys in London?”

“I don’t,” quipped George as Paul said: “It’s not so bad,” and lit a cigarette, for need of an excuse to get some space.

“All the poshest wankers like Paul,” George explained.

“Not so much as you’d think,” Paul countered, in a cloud of blue smoke.

“ ‘Not so good as all that’, ‘not so polite as ya’d think’,” Lennon badgered. “All this promise of misbehaviour, you think you were teasing.”

“It’s true,” George said into the rim of his scotch. “He’s a bad influence. Convinced me to wag off me electrician's apprenticeship once or twice. Maybe permanently.”

Lennon raised an impressed eyebrow. “Aye?”

Paul had no idea why the look made him feel about twelve years old. “I asked George to come to London with me. To work as session musicians, get our careers going.”

“Threw out his college post for it and everything,” George added. Paul hunched his shoulders; no one needed to know that part of it, but Lennon sunk into that like a hook.

“Working class boy made good, and he throws it all away?”

Paul picked the lemon from his fizzy scotch and sluiced the toothpick free. “It wasn’t going to happen for us any other way,” he said stiffy, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. The turn in conversation was prickling his arm-hair.

“What about you?” George wondered.

John lift his scotch with a spider-like dip of the hand - ember of his fag dangling an inch from the surface of the cola. “I’ve an aunt named Maud, if that’s what you mean,” he replied with an imperial snort. “But there wasn’t any bread around when I was growing up. ‘Sides,” he took a drag. “- it’s not like that down under.”

“What’s it like?”

“It’s the New World, man,” John gestured vaguely, splashing cola on the booth. “It’s not like here. We don’t got cultural myths yet, yeah? We don’t hate each other for such byzantine reasons. It’s like America, right? The race thing, how it’s so crude.”

Paul nodded, eyes fixed on the glowing point of John’s cigarette, the drunken ballet of his knobby knuckles. “Beating blacks in the street, just for being.”

“It’s like that, mate, ‘cept more polite depending on the country. In New Zealand, we got one political issue: we took the land, and we haven’t left yet. No one cares what your Auntie’s named.”

“I think -” George said, very sudden and confident, before immediately thinking better of it. Paul and John’s heads turned in unison.

“Do tell us, Georgie,” Lennon urged, scotch and smoke in hand, setting both to his lip, loosening George’s thoughts like he was digging the roots out of teeth, teasing out depths in the conversation forbidden in most settings.

“Pattie and I went to this talk, recently. The Maharishi, the bloke was called, and he said - well,” George stopped when he noticed the way Paul was looking at him.

“You never told me,” is what Paul managed to say.

George’s eyebrows drew together, and he hid under his bangs. “Well, it’s not like I’m converting. I just got thinkin’... the whole reason folks draw away from religion and whatnot’s ‘cause we agree about what it says, underneath it all, but not with how it’s done, practically. And what this bloke was saying, is it so different from what Jesus was supposed to ‘ave said? I thought. So maybe that’s what we ought to look at - in, like, politics I mean, the consistencies beneath. Like a hidden truth.”

John grinned at Paul. “What d’you know, McCartney, he sees it.”

“Past the veil of fear,” Paul agreed, thrilled by the warmth of the secret joke.

George tipped his head to one side, and his fringe went along with it. Later - after he and Paul watched John climb over the table, glasses and all, to roll his way to the loo - he scoot down the booth. “Japanese?”

“Some bird he’s shagging,” Paul replied testily, stirring the ice at the bottom of his tumbler around and around with a toothpick.

“Mmm,” George said wisely. Then: “Want me to bugger off?”

“Huh?”

“You’re actin’ like you’ve got a girl waiting in a hotel room.”

“No I’m not.”

 _Yes you are_ , accused George’s judicious eyebrows.

“I’m -” Paul inhaled sharply, which is the thing one generally does when possessed of a clever rebuttal, but he failed to come up with a defense.

“I was turned on before you, y’know,” George said suddenly, jaw tight. “The grass n’ all that. I’m not square as you think. I didn’t embarrass you in front of your _hip_ new mate, huh?”

A cold sweat shivered down Paul’s back. Wait - is that what George thought? He searched his face for an answer, but George was typically stoic, temperament the colour of the Thames on a February dawn. “George, that’s not -”

“Don’t worry about it.” George stood as abruptly as he’d brought up the thing about marijuana, already digging in his pockets for coins. “Promised Pattie I’d take her out tonight anyroad. Got ‘im all to yourself now.”

It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine, said the irritated twitch of his lip. He would have to wait a while to find out whether it was fine or not. Probably _this_ outburst was about something that happened months ago. John returned from the loo, whistling and snapping his suspenders, as pleased to see them off as he was to join them in the first place. Paul watched George straighten his tie and do up his cufflinks, wistful; George and Pattie still made time to go on dates even though they’d been married a year now. He and Jane were quarreling more than dating these days, but how were they meant to go steady like that when she was never in the _bloody country?_

When George had gone, Lennon lingered on the block, swaying back and forth on the heels of his sneakers. It was one of those horrid days, right before the break of spring, where the sun was summer bright against the colourless streets, grey and cold and blazing all at once. Against this backdrop, John was a drop of honey: clasping his hat against the wind, other hand on his hip, chewing confidently, radiating the warmth of a late September fever.

Paul put his hands in his pockets and wondered if he would leave.

“Y’took my advice,” is what Lennon said, after a full minute.

Paul smiled. “I did.” It had the critics all in a tizzy too, suddenly desperate to give him a second look. At Christmas, Mike told him it was the only good thing he’d done yet and only half of that was ribbing.

John’s gaze swept over him in a slow, soft blink. The sun hit him at an angle to hide his eyes in the amber shadow of his lashes. “I must’ve made an impression on you.”

“Yeah,” Paul agreed, earnest. “A big one.”

Lennon didn’t answer. _Chew, chew, chew._

“I’m not making fun,” Paul insisted.

There was no reason for John to look so suspicious. “Should I be suing for a co-writing credit?” he laughed, but there was something tinny and weak about it.

“D’you want one?”

Lennon’s face went through a few subtle shifts while he decided how seriously to take that, like blending chords when changing key. The roulette landed on _charmingly abashed_. “Ack,” he scratched up under his hat. “Nah, nah. It’s not like I own anything I said. ‘Sides -” he shot Paul a roguish grin, “I’ve always fancied the idea of being some great artist’s muse.”

“ _Now_ I’m a great artist?”

“Well,” John tossed back his long hair, shook it out until it was the shape of a lion’s mane. “- you’ve finally met your muse so your bound t’be, eh?” Grinning cheek-to-cheek, and with all the grace of a goose trying to pass for a swan, he struck a Vanity Fair cover model pose.

The idea was so absurd that it put a hysteric little rattle in Paul’s chest and he bit his lip to keep it in. “Y-yes, um -” the rattle escaped in a hiccup of giggles. Imagine it: this unkempt public disturbance, greasy haired and reeking of marijuana, inspiring the great Greek poets with his delinquent smile. The catch, of course, being that John Lennon was poet himself. “Oh, Great Muse,” Paul pressed his palms together and bowed, Aladdin consulting the Djinn in 1001 Nights. “May I consult you on another matter of truth and beauty?”

“Such a demanding mistress, McCartney! You’ll drain me muse-ly essence!”

“But you were so willing last time, darling!”

“Ah, ah, _that_ was the night before!”

“ _‘When I held you near’_ ,” Paul crooned. “ _‘You were so sincere’_.”

“ _‘When I think of things we did’_ ,” Lennon wheezed back. “ _‘It makes me wanna cryyyy-ayyy-ayyyy’._ ”

“What kinda uptight skag of a muse puts out on the first date and not the second?”

John grinned and lit up a cigarette. Sucked in a mouthful of it. “That’s how the birds trap you, isn’t it mate?”

“Hm?”

“Make you think they’re easy, to reel you in.” John set the fag to his bottom lip, smoke coiling around him in an embrace. “Then play hard to get once they’ve tricked you close.”

“You’re not a bird,” Paul said dumbly, losing track of who was what in this joke they were playing hot potato with. His gaze was drawn to the way John’s hand engulfed his entire face when he took a long drag. The smoke encased them both, and Paul realized that he was not leaving. “You’re -”

Lennon raised his chin, eyes slits of gold.

Paul’s hand slipped into his pocket. He brandished his chequebook, like a paper fan. “I want your help buying a painting.”

Lennon’s chin remained imperiously tilted.

“- or a print, a sculpture - whatever it is you do. I want one.” He had, soon as John sunk his teeth into that absurdly pretentious apple. He’d even attempted to purchase a piece over his head, calling around the underground galleries under fake names, but John Lennon’s work wasn’t published anywhere Paul could find it.

“... you haven’t even seen it,” John pointed out in a tremendously even tone. “Y’want to buy me art - ‘a print, sculpture, oh, ho, ho, _whatever it is you doooo’_ -” Paul winced at how grating his solicitous tone sounded lampooned back at him. “- you don’t even know what it’s about. What the fuck are ya _on_ about that you _want one?_ ”

“So what that I haven’t seen it?” Paul retorted, wide-eyed. He was certain that even if he viscerally hated the art itself, a John Lennon Original would surely be something he absolutely _had_ to own. The sort of art that made life worth living wasn’t about _“like”_ or _“dislike”_ in his opinion.

“‘So’s what’, that I’m not a _fuckin’ charity case_ ,” Lennon hissed, the temper coming over him in a seachange. He was so furious he dashed his newly lit cigarette to the ground and stamped it out. The ashy scent of burnt tobacco fouled the air. “I don’t need your fucking pity, McCartney. If I were looking to get down on me knees for some wannabe trendsetter’s private collection, I’d have more self respect than t’do it for a two-bit crooner desperate to break onto the rock chart before his looks dry up!”

Paul smiled placidly and backed the conversation up a few steps. He shouldn’t have taken out the chequebook. “I won’t pay for it, then,” he said firmly, at a volume that told Lennon he was doing him a favour, ignoring that last part. “But you’re going to give me one anyway.”

That bit of lip got him tentatively interested. “Is that so?” he drawled, easing back, hands braced on his hips.

The chequebook was away and forgotten. “I don’t usually show my music to strangers like that. So it’s only fair…” Paul ventured, and felt as if this conversation were a ship with the ballast listing to and ‘fro. Finally, he caught it. Or John caught it. Or they were both holding it at the same time. 

_If you show me yours -_

John thawed, and threw him a bone. “S’only fair that I show you mine.”

\--

John led him down the river and past the docks, wind whipping them by and forcing them to walk knock-elbowed and scooped into their chests. Lennon was squatting in an abandoned tenement hugging a bombed-out factory, and it didn’t look like he was the only bloke in the neighbourhood. It was necessary to climb in through the fire-escape; John wrenched the shuddering window open and the wind screeched to fill the gap.

“After you, _Mary Lou_ ,” he hummed.

Paul grippled the sill and swung himself inside, into a musky smog of mold and paint, the stale scent of marijuana clinging to gummy, rotting wood. The room was an attic flat: low ceilings, open space, papered with peeling floral wallpaper, paint sloughing from the skin of the ceiling and filled with light so gentle and diffuse that it made the dust-soaked air glow. 

“Sorry, I know it’s a bit mad, me living arrangements. You don’t have’ta--”

“You’ve got electricity?” Paul interrupted, noticing that there was a lamp, a television set, and, critically: a turntable.

John cackled like a child and swooped past him. “Just in the one outlet, don’t tell the Queen on me, mate.”

Paul pulled the window shut behind him and leant against it, listened to the wind sigh through the rotting walls. Paul’s house held firm against the wind; cracked, sometimes, so rigid and unyielding it shook down to the foundations. John’s house bowed and breathed, creaking the way a ship swayed on stormy water - and there it was again, the ballast rolling around and around the room. Paul’s palms were burning, throat tight like he’d fallen face first in a patch of nettles, all cotton and needles. What was he anticipating? He felt about sixteen years old, having his first sip of beer behind a chip cart at some village fete. John Lennon - a failed musician, a failing artist, squatting in a mouldering apartment with no refrigerator, but he did have: a fine, white rug, a victorian chaise covered in palettes and paint cans, and a record collection at least half as big as Paul’s. Was it possible that he was the real deal?

“Sit anywhere,” John called from his pantry.

There wasn’t a chair, nor anywhere else to sit, so Paul fanned through the record collection instead. He stopped with his thumb on a Miracles LP and picked it out. The Brits turned up their nose up at the race riots in America, but it was still a task to find anyone who listened to black music in London. The working class scenes - like what he and George’d huddled in back and eavesdropped on at The Cavern once in an Elvis’s _Blue Moon_ \- had always been turned onto it, and London’s underground was lush with influence from the Caribbean communities, but there was no communication between England and the American scene. Good luck breaking the class barrier, let alone the other stuff.

He considered asking John his opinion on all that. He’d probably have something worldly and rude to say about it, but he flipped another record over to find himself staring into his own big, dark eyes.

“A _hem!_ ”

John looked fit for life in prison when he saw Paul holding up his mint-fresh, but clearly _opened_ and _once or twice_ removed from its sleeve, copy of the _Yesterday_ LP. “I nicked that after I met you, swear on me Auntie Maud’s grave,” he exclaimed, hands in the air. “I was curious after your new one! Wanted to see where it all came from!”

“Nicked it?”

“You think I’ve got the dough to pay for records?”

Paul laughed at the simplicity of his explanation. He plucked his new single out of the rack and dangled it in the air. “What’d you think?”

He should have asked _‘did you like it’_ , but he was too afraid the answer would be a definitive ‘no’. The ballast slipped from his arms. John shrugged.

“Yeah-nah, I mean, sure - I dug it,” he said casually.

“The B side too?”

“Almost liked that one better, the way you did it straight folk, with just you and the guitar instead of hiding your songwriting behind a bunch’ve goopy strings.”

He supposed that’s the best he was going to get. Coming here to get insulted by a burnout... he felt like a parody of a behaviour he and Jane had recently discussed cropping up in their social circle: an obsession with authenticity that made one incapable of seeing the forest for the trees. But John _understood_ ; he instantly got what Paul was doing with ‘Paperback Writer’. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was impossible to ignore, but not entirely out of his wheelhouse. The B-side, however, was a pure songwriting feat: the discerning taste-makers would be forced to listen to it, see his talent, and be left with absolutely no idea where he was going to take it next.

Barring catastrophic producer interference, Paul was dead certain he was writing music that would fulfill all these new expectations and then some. He knew it in his _bones_ , that he’d pierced that veil John had described; the critical praise was already yanking him from bed each morning like an over-cranked marionette, and he hadn’t even finished penning the songs that were going to earn it for him.

“I hate those bloody strings, I really do,” Paul sighed, and he set Smokey Robinson on the turntable. The room filled with the brassy shuck and grind of a horn section under worn needle, putting the world in balance once more.

“D’you mind if I -” John was leant over the island in his pantry, shaking a bag of marijuana. “If it doesn’t offend Master’s sensibilities.”

Paul rose to his feet without saying a word. He glided across the flat, grooving to Smokey’s ribbon-smooth pleading as he went. “Give it here,” he beckoned, producing two papers from his coat pocket with tap-dance flourish

Lennon’s eyes practically bugged out. 

Paul was so smug his ears went red under John’s sudden and _intense_ scrutiny. He snatched the bag and scooped out about a gram and a half, maybe two.

“... really did make an impression,” Lennon murmured, almost to himself.

“ _‘The guys I used to run around with tell me that I've changed’,_ ” Paul trilled along with the record. “ _‘That I'm acting kinda strange.’_ Since I met _yoooou_ , girl.” Gaze veiled, he watched John watch him from his peripheral vision: watched him track the confidence of his fingers, the ease with which he pinched the two ends of the spliff together, Paul’s heart hammering so hard he really _felt_ that kick-drum getting wallopped by the session drummer. He raised his chin and his gaze got tangled with John’s like a fishing line.

“You’re an expert now, huh? A quick study, that you McCartney?” Paul licked his thumb, and the whole time John held his eyes like a dare. The stormclouds were finally rolling in, passing over the old tenement in a black regiment. In the shade, Paul couldn’t read the mood between them.

“That’s what all the report cards said,” he winked, and sealed the two papers together. 

“Like I guessed: p n’ q’s.”

“S’was about the only thing me report cards said,” Paul clarified, pressing the joint to his lips and lighting it up. He sucked in, pulled the smoke into his chest, pepper and moss. When he exhaled without coughing, John - the cheeky arse - started clapping.

“Oh, shut it,” Paul groused, clearing his throat against the outside of his wrist. “Weren’t you going to show me a painting?”

“Or a print, or a sculpture,” John sing-songed, snapping the joint away with an impolite _“Ta!”_ and taking a big, bracing toke. “Let me finish buttering you up first,” he purred, smoke spiraling from both nostrils

“Is it really so bad?” John, hesitated. Paul took the spliff back - waved it, then amended: “Dangerous to the public sensibilities, I meant?”

“Haven’t I told you, I’m a right public menace, I am.” John’s grin retuned like the sun coming over a hill. “Tea or whiskey?” he asked. The windows shook as the flat was assaulted by a sheet of ice cold rain.

“Why not both?” Paul suggested, taking another long hit. The room was filling with smoke, heady and tinged yellow and green in the filtered light. It was already swimming through him: silky between the folds of his mind, fuzzy at the knees, sinking down his body like a glass being filled with nectar. John jigged out a theatrical bow, pinched the joint back for another pull before he went about setting the kettle. 

Spliff dangling ‘tween two fingers, buzzed and feeling all bustled and fluttery, Paul went exploring again, curious to learn John Lennon’s secrets. Paul saw him toss a piece of scrap into the wood stove from the corner of his eye and wondered about his daily life, tried to imagine him scouring up and down the construction zones, busting crates apart to keep himself warm in the winter. All he had in his kitchen was tea, whiskey, marijuana, cereal and - mysteriously - cat food. The flat was, bisected by a thick, dusty curtain Paul instinctively interpreted as forbidden. There was a room to sleep, but no toilet or sink, and outside the shut bedroom door was an upturned crate containing a vibrantly cared for aloe vera plant, and a stack of un-glossed magazines. Paul lift the top magazine and his eyes went about the size of the moon.

On the cover of the first periodical were two men, locked in an unmistakeably lustful embrace - a dainty blond lad tracing his thin fingers along the line of his dark-eyed partner’s pectoral, the dark eyed man tugging him close by the collar locked around his neck. Fully clothed, but looking so slick and besotted that their shirts were kept on by the barest scientific laws of friction and gravity.

“Aye, stop wasting the grass, mate,” John called across the room.

Hands shaking, Paul brought the joint to his lips, because yes: it was very rude to let someone else’s pot burn all the way down on your watch. What was the appropriate move here? To let the magazine drop and pretend that he hadn’t seen anything? To make unseemly assumptions, and then politely shuffle them to the back of one’s mind? Couldn’t he ask about it? 

“Oh,” John said, having finally noticed. Paul whipped around on his heel like he’d been caught stealing from a corner store. Lennon was composed, laid-back, still all smiles and the body language of a pretzel coming undone - not acting found out in the slightest. “Y’found my side gig, I see.”

“Side gig?” Paul asked with audibly forced levity. Christ, he sounded like a fucking bird - both kinds. _It’s not the thing about being bent, if that’s what it is,_ he wanted to defend himself. _It’s the_ \- the everything else. The photo was in black and white, but the collar’s chain was catching reflection from an overhead light, glinting like a lighthouse at midnight. His thoughts about it were doing clumsy gymnastics, lost in a haze halfway to stoned.

“Page twenty-six,” Lennon instructed, making the motions of flipping through a book. “Should be that, in the most recent issue.”

Paul had never been the sort to believe in monsters under the bed, and when Mike was little he would tell him _“ah, but it can’t hurt you if y’don’t look”_ , because to look for something was to believe in it, and to believe in it was to give it power. It was with this hysterically demiurgic superstition that he slid out the offensive periodical and carefully folded his way to the twenty-sixth page without looking at any a single photograph. What he found was:

“ _A Saucy Sojourn in Saigon_ ,” he read aloud. “By Wilde B. Stallion?” He looked up to meet John’s waiting gaze. 

“The ‘B’ stands for ‘blowjob’.”

“That’s you?”

“Earning me weekly butter, I told ya.”

Paul scanned the short story, found himself sniggering a few times, but the moment he encountered the term ‘blowjob’ in the text, in non-subtext form he snapped the magazine shut and took a deep, bracing drag off the joint. “Um, er,” he laughed some more and hoped that it sounded circular and open-minded. “You’re pretty good,” _I think?_ , Paul declined to add “- why not try selling to the lads too?”

“‘Coz They don’t pay worth the dirt on me boot!” John snorted. “Don’t ya watch the news, McCartney? America’s exportin’ their sexual revolution to the rest of the world! Girlie mags pay pence on the pound these days, but the poofs?” He picked up both teacups and sashayed across the room as the song on the turntable clicked over. “Bunch’ve lonely, idle bachelors with no kids and open chequebooks.” John handed Paul the cup of tea, and Paul handed him the joint.

“An exploitable audience,” he observed, mouth on the rim of the teacup. He hadn’t considered it from that angle before, and thought of the queer chaps in his and Jane’s circle. Idle, yes, but lonely he hoped not. 

“Who d’you think’s been buying all the art in England when your bloody cities are still in shambles? Ahhhh - now _this_ is the one!” John reached past Paul and pumped the turntable up. “ _‘Now when you need the love he’s never shown ya’,_ ” he wailed through the smoke. “ _‘Come round here’!_ ”

“ _‘And when you need some lovin’ arms to hooold you’_ ,” Paul went along, just to spur him on and hear that heart-cracking falsetto of his again. It set something alight in Lennon’s eyes and they belted out the chorus together, warbling and gliding up and down the soul scales until they found that perfect harmony from the pub four months ago. They broke the lock, laughing - tea splashing, smoke sputtering - and John grabbed the edge of the curtain guarding his studio with dark dramatic flair.

“Will you walk into my parlour?” said John to Paul, “I promise ‘tis the prettiest little parlour you ever did spy.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve seen what’s in your pantry…”

“You can really have no notion how delightful it will be,” John promised, “when they take us up and throw us with the lobsters out to sea!"

Paul took a sip of whiskey and looked askance, Smokey’s voice whistling through the creaky floorboards: _now the days you sit alone by yourself... waiting til he has time for you_. Ah, Jane, dear Jane, off to America for six months and she expected him not to take up with other girls in all that time; perhaps they should get married and be done with it, all the fussing and fighting and separation, the anguish of courting, of half-committed romance. _Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?_ He was glutted up to the ceiling, lousy with drink and smoke and good music, and an invitation in John Lennon’s eyes that he couldn’t decode, or deny.

“What matters it, how far we go?” he replied with two fingers to his sternum, and Lennon pulled the studio curtain open, scampering back madly, ending with a flick of the wrist, beckoning Paul in with the pose of a poorly trained usher. Paul returned the mocking genuflection as he floated into the studio. It was lit - well, by a bay window facing the west, the pink evening sun cutting through the non-committal storm clouds like swords on the Thames; so, John Lennon was not a man who worked before noon. _Me either, if I can help it_ , Paul wanted to say, but then he would have to explain how he got the inference and wouldn’t that sound strange? _I think I can know things about you just from having seen how you live. You sleep until noon. You feed cats. You’ve a terribly nasty mind but you care about beauty_. With the grass all in his head he felt like he could hear the conversation without it actually happening,

“I actually lost most of my work recently… er… unavoidable circumstances, so…” Lennon was going on apologizing for some reason, but Paul didn’t bother listening, because. The art. Yes - _the art_ : he loved it immediately.

On canvases of any size, in paint of any kind - some with decoupage or mosaic from books or papers; dreamy, aggressive clouds of impressionistic watercolour fouled by oily swamps of swirling, chaotic reds and blues, and in the chaos, in all the spaces between the abstraction, danced a tapestry of interlocked cartoon figures in dazzling, kaleidoscope configurations. Like Dr Suess, or the engravings the Aztecs used to predict the end of the world.

“Well, d’you like or hate it?” John demanded impatiently.

“It reminds me of, uh,” Paul tapped his lip. “Willem de Koonig, like _The Attic_.”

He raised a sincerely confused eyebrow at that. “How’s that?”

“Just a feeling I get,” Paul shrugged. A single curved line could mean so many things, a canvas made up entirely of suggestions. “It’s not telling me what to think. I like that.”

“Y’don’t like being told what to do, eh, McCartney?”

“Can’t stand it,” Paul got to the divot at the bottom of the teacup, where all the whiskey had pooled beneath the chai. “More’n most things, really.”

“They must have you by the short hairs with you soundin’ the way you do on all your records.”

“I always looked at it like I was doing things I didn’t want to, so later I could do whatever I wanted. Doing my time, n’ all that.”

“How’s that approach workin’ out for you?”

“‘Bout as well as yours, but in the opposite direction.”

Paul glanced over his shoulder to catch John’s eye, and they laughed.

“BB King and Lewis Carroll too,” Paul added, and his voice was glittering he was smiling so bright.

“What?”

“I would’ve known you loved rock n’ roll and _Wonderland_ by looking at these.

John’s eyes broadened, vivid with curiosity, shoulders drawn up again, that way he was when they met. “How would you have known?”

“Just the way you paint. It’s so, hmm -” Paul shut his eyes and affected the manner of an orchestra conductor. He tried to picture how a blues lick would look like coming from a brush, Caroll’s prose spilt on a canvas. “It’s like in a musical when the characters start singing,” he directed with his teacup. “- that’s the power of the emotion. In that sense, music’s like hearing beneath the words, the things you can’t get into words.”

“The things you can’t put your finger on…”

Paul’s eyes snapped open. “Love and beauty, the universal truths at the heart of everything."

“Oh, is _that_ all?” Lennon was all supine and catlike again. “Sweet as all that?”

“Sweet as all that.”

“Well, no pressure t’get it right, then.”

“Can I see?” Paul pointed to the canvas he was lingering aside, opposite the window. Nearly floor-to-ceiling, and covered in a yellowing sheet, tantalizing in its shadowed promise.

John’s jaw locked. He licked his lips and looked away. “That one’s not done yet.”

“I know,” Paul insisted, holding his gaze steady, the empty cup clasped in both hands. This did nothing to cure Lennon of his hesitation. On the other side of the veil, the record eased to the end, needle skipping and scratching.

 _1, 2, 3,_ counted out Paul with the heel of his shoe. The beat echoed smartly in the giant room. “ _She was just seventeen_ ,” he sang, to remind John what was up. They’d made a bargain. “ _If you know what I mean_.”

John shook his head, tsking, but there was a unrestrained chuckle beneath it. “You’re a dangerous one, McCartney.”

“I told you, I told you so.”

“Go ahead, for fuck’s sake. Christ.”

Paul set the teacup down with John’s brushes and pulled the sheet off. It was as tall as Paul was, one layer dabbed green and white as if left beneath a sheaf of inky rain. Pulled down its middle like a nervous system was a smear of blue so thick it was still wet, sticky to the sight.

“What is it?”

“Thought you didn’t like to be told what to do.”

Paul interpreted it for himself. 

“It’s... water.”

“Did you get your A levels with that sort’ve insight?”

“Dunedin - it’s on the water, right?”

It took Lennon a beat to respond. “Yeah. Er. A harbour.”

Paul traced his finger through the air along the blue strip. “And Liverpool’s on the Mersey…” he could see it now, in the blooms and churning eddies of paint, where the mouths of the cities met, like, “- a mirror,” he said out loud, and realized that he was touching the canvas. His fingers sunk into the oil surface of the Mersey and the paint clung to his fingers in creamy chunks of blue and yellow. The texture - cold and slimy, crisp at first blush - shivered through his stoned body, and he snapped his hand away.

He whirled around on his heel, appalled. “Mister Lennon, I -”

“Call me John,” Mister Lennon interrupted, in a tone devoid of anything in particular. He was leant against the wall with one hand hooked on his hip, suspender slouching off, sucking the joint down to the blunt, bitter end. Smoke coming out his nose, billowing in silky sheets from between his creased lips, ballooning clouds the shape of mushrooms, the pink sun bronzing his hair the colour of rust. A wizard, or a dragon, Paul couldn’t decide.

“I don’t mind it,” he went on, waving the joint. “You’ve got your fingers all up in me mindspace now, luv, doesn’t that put us on a first name basis?”

Paul nodded slowly, smearing the paint between his fingers. “Alright, John.”

“Alright, Paul.” John’s smile was slinky, as if he knew about the ballast shifting between them and was satisfied to have caught it. A dragon it was.

Paul was dizzy. Mostly it was the pot, but also it was the way Lennon said his name, like he’d been waiting to say it. Why should it feel so important to move past simple formalities? It’s not like they’d been formal up until now. Was it, was it? Was it that John Lennon was a figment of his imagination, a madman who’d spun him a tall tale, a free spirited drifter whomst he’d never see again, and who likely didn’t remember his name? But he was real, and everything he’d said was true, and now they were friends.

“Keep going,” John said.

“Okay,” Paul agreed, and he turned to face the canvas. John’s gaze sat on his shoulders like a hand clothed in a lead glove. He was trembling when he set his fingers in the ultramarine paint, dragged it through the side of the palette where white was blending grey and cream around the edges. He wound his fingertips round and round until the colour he thought he could hear beneath the surface of John’s painting emerged.

He dipped three fingers in the tail of the Mersey and trailed them through the currents, springing from the river when he met a knot of dried paint, leaving behind bursts of milky, scattershot stars. He was thinking of his and John’s journey through the veil that foggy night in November, a tune dripping from his lip, casual, half-conscious; he tried to paint what he heard, _hm, hm, hm, a walk through the park, something, something, you and me in the foggy dark_. 

“I was listening -” John started, then stopped. Paul hummed pleasantly, filled the silence for him, thinking in the F major scale. “I was listenin’ to it... when I started painting…” He sounded so uncertain.

“To what?”

“You know what.”

Oh. Paul swiped a newly blended pink through orange on the palette, smudged it in the flakes of the drying red to give it an edge of rust. He hoped that he had not approximated the colour of his face. It was like Lennon was reading his mind. “I was thinking about how you'd sung Smokey Robinson at my house in November when I did the bridge on that one.”

John didn’t say anything.

“Not trying to sound like you or anything, just the -” Paul added waves of sunrise around the mouth of Dunedin’s harbour. He couldn’t explain music and paint and be high all at the same time.

With one last diamond embellishment, Paul stepped back from the canvas, satisfied. John didn’t ask what his addition meant, which was prescient, because he had no intention of telling.

“What’s with you and me _fuckin’_ voice?”

“It makes me feel,” Paul took a deep breath and set his hand on his chest. _Like I’ve skipped a step on a long, spiral staircase_. “Well, it has that quality, the - y’know, the _thump, ba-dump_.” He hit his chest three times. _And on that staircase, my heart’s bouncing like a rubber ball_. “I can sing almost any style, but I don’t have that.”

John puffed out a harsh breath. “What, you want me to sing on one of your records now?”

“Come by and take a look at my new songs and we’ll see what happens.”

“What?”

Paul realized that he was getting paint all over his clothes. “Do you have anywhere I could wash up?”

John crossed the room automatically, pulling a threadbare cloth from his pocket and handing it over. “We’ll have to, er, go downstairs -” he tugged his hair. “You serious about wanting me to look at more of your songs?”

“Mmm hmm,” Paul looked up from where he was trying to rub the paint off. “You free next Wednesday?”

For some reason, John cursed under his breath before saying yes.

Downstairs, Paul washed his hands in a rusty tub, in the near dark with only Lennon’s zippo to light the space around them, with water that was almost unbearably cold. But Paul’s whole soul was brimming warm with song.

“Truth is I don’t know what they mean, not ‘til I’m done,” John was admitting, in a small, gentle voice. Paul was slung over one edge of the tub, scrubbing away, and John was sat on the opposite rim, leant so close they were murmuring into each other’s noses, on account that they couldn’t see a hands-width’s length. The air between them was buzzing with something so thick that Paul could breathe it in. So he did, and let himself look into John’s eyes the way he wanted to, but was too self conscious to do when they were in public, when they were sober. They were so deep, John Lennon’s eyes, the place where the water drops off and the tide sucks you down. He felt like he knew what he was going to say before he said it. He felt like whatever John was going to say next could be anything, anything at all in the entire universe.

“I think it’s fine not to know what they mean,” Paul said confidently, chipping the paint from under his nails. Once again, the flickering firelight turning Lennon’s spectacles into mirror-window-mirror-window-mirrors. “It’s what makes life beautiful, those mysteries we can’t solve.” 

_Would you really want to know what love is?_

_No_ , John answered silently, in the way his cheeks dimpled. Paul had thought his smile so feline and dangerous when he’d met him, but there was something boyish underneath it all. He hummed that tune which’d been clinging to him all afternoon, rattling ‘round his head like a coin in a can, and finally found the right key.

\--

The week between then and Wednesday passed in a haze, a daze, a dazey haze, as March turned less grey and Paul began to see new colours in ordinary things. 

Really, what was it all about? What _has_ he been doing since he came to London? The first time he and George came down from Liverpool, they were hitchhiking with their guitars on their backs and Ian trailing along down the road, waving as he watched them disappear in a cloud of black smoke, drainies and pomade hidden at the bottom of their bags and the confidence to stroll into a pub like they were old enough to be there. They hadn’t told a soul apart from the lads they knew could keep a secret and, of course, Paul got a right good smack across the face for that one, his Da was worried sick. So the next time they went to London it was done the right way: on a bus, with savings tucked away in an account, a drafty flat waiting off Bethnal Green and five auditions already lined up. When he’d sold ‘A World Without Love’ he had no intentions of recording it himself, that wispy lark of a song, it was just a way to keep the heat on come November. 

Monday found him sitting at the back of the National Theater, spectating Strindberg’s _The Dance of Death_ with Jane’s hand on his knee, which was unpleasantly on the nose. They’d fought the night before, and the night before that - all weekend, really; on Friday they entertained friends and she opened the window to let the smoke out, and he closed it to keep it in, because that was the _point_ of smoking, and so on and so on. From then on it was open warfare, and not the kind from the early days: the sort of argumentation that’s actually foreplay. A waste, being that she only lived with him on the weekends, her long rebellion against him, this ancient battle of attrition - refusal to live with him until they were married. As if they did not already spend most of their time together doing the things separate living arrangements were meant to prevent! 

Paul wondered if the whole cohabitation struggle was another matter them opening and closing the window. She took it terribly personal when he told her he’d invested in his own home, because hadn’t the Ashers done well by him? And yes, that _was_ the problem, wasn’t it, the way he felt obliged to hedge his words politely, pretty up his childhood, pretend that he didn’t still count the coins in his pocket, heart pounding fast when he only found a half pence or two. This life - the girl, the parties, the art - was always part of the plan, in there somewhere, distantly, but too often he felt he was hovering at the edges of it holding an untouched drink, waiting for his chance to join the ball. What does it mean, to have a thing, but not really _have_ it? It wasn’t intentional, but Jane’s family did act rather like they’d trained him up, as if his da wasn’t a literate jazz musician, as if he couldn’t find books all on his own, as if his mum -

_A couple of Scouse boys in London? How do you stand it?_

Well.

He could resist chewing his fingernails in public, but often he found himself absently grinding them down against each other, thumbnail picking at the nick near his pointer’s cuticle over and over again until the edge flattened out. Paul glanced at Jane in the darkness of the theater: her pert nose and marmalade hair and that clever little purse to her lips when she was really paying attention. They came here on their third date, and while it was very exciting to be sat amongst all this high society, absorbing Shakespeare in the complete opposite fashion in which it was designed to be enjoyed, Paul’d had his hand up her skirt before the cross-dressing was revealed. 

Oh, she’d been so delighted with him then, at his boldness, the crass ideas floating around that head of his no matter how many rags dubbed him “angelic”. _You and me in the foggy dark_ , Paul thought, a wicked smile creeping ‘cross his lips. His hand crawled surreptitiously beneath the seat, an innocent arm around snaked Jane’s waist, and a moment later his fingers were dancing up the curve of her pale, perfect leg. _Maybe this time I’ll get my fingers in your marmalade heart._

She looked down, red eyelashes catching the stage lights, all stars and fire.

“C’mon home with me tonight,” he murmured into the shell of her ear.

“On a Monday?” she whispered back, all playfully fake offense, adjusting her skirt to hide the trajectory of his hand.

“Mmm. Stay the week.” _Stay the year_ , he thought, but she wouldn’t consider it. She was more amenable than usual with his thumb snapped into the band of her bloomers, but Jane Asher took pride in occasionally pretending to be immune to his charms.

“Your chickidee live here?” John wondered, peering at the photos on the mantel: Jane and her brother, Jane and him at Edinburgh Castle for their first anniversary, he and Mike with some of the local boys the first Christmas he went home after his record deal, the only picture he had of his mother.

“Not often,” Paul replied, voice cool. That earned a look, one of John’s arch, bushy eyebrows shooting up above the horn-rimmed glasses. He didn’t look so out of place in Paul’s fancy Victorian townhouse, amongst the century old gouges in the wood floor and the untidily stacked shelves. He was well organized, but could never figure out how to make his house quite look it.

“Trouble in paradise?”

“Well, you know how’s it is with birds.” Paul popped the cap off a beer and handed it to John with a knowing smile. “They reel you in, then play hard to get.”

John watched him take a swig off his own drink. “I told ya - that’s why you’ve gotta sell to the poofs,” he grinned, following suit.

Picking up a conversation again nearly a week later... it was like that first one never ended. Paul sailed past John, deeper into the reading room, snatching his notebook as he went. He sat himself at his smudged-up Steinway and did a couple scales to unwind. John dithered, still in his coat, rolling the lip of the bottle on his chin.

“... say, uh -”

“Mmm hmm.”

“So. What’s this all about, huh?”

Paul glanced over his shoulder. “What’s that?”

“All this,” John gestured, uselessly. “What it is we’re doin’ here. You having me over to... look at your music, or whatever.”

It was Paul’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “I’m having you over, to look at my music.”

“... that’s really all you want?”

“Why’s that hard to believe?” Paul flipped open his songbook and beckoned him to the piano. “I never had a mate who I could talk to about this stuff.”

John didn’t budge. “Aren’t you surrounded by musicians the entire goddamn livelong day?”

Paul shrugged. “Whose opinion I could trust.” He poured out a new melody he’d been thinking about since breakfast, easy as rain. Seemed more like a harmony, though. “You’ve got the same thoughts about it as I do.”

“What about that little friend of yours? George? You seemed gobbed he knew shit all about anything last week.”

John’s tone had gained an odd insistence, and Paul completely lost the plot on his tune, gone rigid when Lennon took a shovel straight to a grave he preferred to leave long buried. How was it possible that he noticed such a thing when he’d barely been paying attention to Paul that afternoon? “George is - no, no, it’s no good.”

“Why not?”

 _Plink, plink, plink_. “George and I… we gave it a go, having a band together, but it didn’t pull through.”

“Ah, well - high school sweethearts rarely last these days, I’m hearin’.” Finally, John loosened up and made his way cross the room.

Paul smiled bitterly. “We’re too different. He’s more into craft, likes doing different things for the sake of it, y’get - while I wanted to, um, develop a style, I s’pose, even when experimenting.” _F sharp, B, D sharp major. Minor, major, mino_ \- “He’s happy as a session player, but I thought I’d go bloody mad.”

“And you’re probably better,” John said, plopping down backwards on the piano bench. “‘Course you’d go mad.”

Paul glanced up, and knew that he was not looking nearly as aghast on George’s behalf as was socially appropriate.

“I know you’re not _s’posed_ to say it out loud.” John dug around his pocket, “S’why I said it for ya, luv, otherwise why would he take everything so personal? Ciggie or spliff?”

“Ciggie,” Paul answered, eyes downcast, but not turned away. John lit one cigarette. Took a drag, handed it over. “See - _that’s_ why I want your opinion.” His scales transmuted into a groove, and he tried to explain what he meant by serenading Lennon with Bobby Freeman.

“ _Do you wanna dance, under the moonlight, squeeze me all through the night - oh baby, do you wanna dance_ -”

Without skipping a beat, John spun around and started plunking out the guitar part, fudging every third or fourth note. “ _Oh baby, baby_ ,” he improvised, and so on. He reeled them a hard left-turn onto the blues scales, mashing out a clumsy, rockabilly beat. “ _Oh baby, baby, now listen and I'll tell you baby, what I’m talking about -_ ”

Paul caught up. “ _Come on back to me, little girl -_ ” (John said: “ _McCartney_ -” instead, and Paul skipped a few notes, giggling).

“ _\- so we can play some house._ ”

Paul re-asserted Bobby Freeman, dragging John along. “ _Well, do ya wanna dance_ ,” they sang together, but where Paul went: “- _and a a-hold my hand_ ,” John swerved: “- _and a a-hold my penis!_ ”

Paul started laughing so hard the cigarette tumbled from his mouth, bouncing down the keys as he went: _D major, C minor, bling, blang, bwooorm._

“It’s what the song’s _about_ , Paul!” John cried in his defense, punctuating his sentence with incoherent chords. He snipped up the cigarette before it could roll off and set it in Paul’s mouth. Paul took a drag without taking it back, then pulled away, leaving John holding the smoke and blinking like an owl.

“Imagine if you could,” Paul snickered, rubbing his nose. “Just write it that way.”

“S’what they did in the Middle Ages, aye? Haven’t you read Chaucer?”

Chaucer, in fact, had been how he seduced Jane in the first place.

“Besides, McCartney, _more importantly, McCartney_ -” John put the fag to his mouth, that weird way he did, with the lazy grip of a tarantula. “I didn’t take ya for a screamer.”

Paul fluttered his eyelashes theatrically. “There’s so _much_ you don’t know about me, Mistah Lennon,” he drawled, attempting an American Southern accent, but ending up in New York.

John whapped him with the back of his hand, scattering ash on the shoulder of his t-shirt. “I’m serious, ya daft piker, you lil’ _tease_ \- you’ve been holdin’ out! You can really get up there!”

Paul played some half-remembered jazz scales in response.

“I heard you askin’ me to dance under the moonlight,” John swooped in, nose-to-nose, voice a low hiss of sandpaper, whisking between them like a lazy tide at dawn. “I bet y’could do a Little Richard no problem…”

Paul knew for a fact he could, but chose to play coy with some carefully selected honestly. “It’s about attitude too, yeah? I couldn’t do soul, or even straight R&B, I don’t think.”

“Sure, but maybe you could do rock after all.” John’s fingers did a careless pirouette up the scale, and he rest the heel of his right hand against Paul’s left. He’d slid down the bench to sidle their legs up just as cozy. There he was again, with that attentive, focused stare that made Paul feel like he was about to jump through a hoop of fire to impress him. The moment when they first looked each other over in the Indica’s basement hadn’t ended yet: they were still evaluating, searching something out.

Paul pinched the stub of the cigarette from John’s lips and finished it in a languid inhale. He ashed it in the tray he kept on the piano’s music shelf and breathed the smoke directly into John’s face, snickering when the man drew back coughing and swearing. “Then don’t shove your beery breath in me face, y’divvy bastard.” Paul jostled him playfully with his shoulder.

“Not even one brew deep, and out comes the Liddypool!”

“ _Shurrrrrrup!_ ” Paul over-enunciated, then launched into a pitch perfect rendition of ‘Tutti Frutti’. John wasn’t shocked he didn’t stink; he was stunned that he was doing it, more like, which was a whole other, but adjacent, thing. _Impressed_ , then, but that quickly morphed into satisfaction, like he was telling Paul _I told ya so_ over his own accomplishment. Was it possible to be flattered and infuriated at once?

“You can do better ‘n that,” is what John Lennon said about all that.

Paul kicked him in the ankle, eliciting a crocodile's complaint, and then he did better.

“Cmon, c’mon,” John clapped, “- really _throw_ it, man.”

Paul did, and his falsetto cracked from his nasal cavity all the way to the back of the throat. His voice came out raked across a grater, washboard-hoarse, and in that raggy edge Paul heard what John must be hearing, just for a moment.

“Whew!” He cut himself off, laughing for the pure joy of it. “That was -” he sniggered into his hand. “Sexy, yeah? Didn’t know I could do it quite that good.”

John retrieved the unlit joint from earlier and set it between Paul’s lips. “Sexy like DH Lawrence,” he said, flicking out his lighter.

“That’s a bit out of the middle ages,” Paul comment mushily around the damp paper.

“He’s right,” said Jane from the door. Paul wrenched around, his elbow brightening the room with an astonished and very accidental arpeggio. “Please don’t light that up while I’m here,” she asked reasonably, pressing her nostrils shut.

John set the lighter away obediently, body language all alley-cat demure again, and Paul was fumbling to hand the spliff back. “Jane, how long’ve you been here?”

“I just got in,” she was holding her shoes by the heels, one dainty finger curled in each. “But I heard the singing from downstairs.” There was something about Jane at home, in stockings.

“So, you think I’m sexy like DH Lawrence?” Paul dallied with a wink.

“Sexy like Elvis,” Jane corrected. “I always thought you could sing American,” and naturally, buried in there was a parry in their latest discussion about the course of her movie career. “You didn’t tell me to expect company.”

“I forgot,” Paul answered honestly. Beside him, John’s jaw squared up.

“Would you,” Jane’s pretty, pale eyes fell on him. “Like to stay for dinner?” She didn’t look enthused about the invitation, but she was hiding it well.

John scoffed rudely, and shoved hands into his pockets, rising with that chicken-armed slouch. It was as if a cold air had sluiced through the room. “Not particularly. If I’m such an imposition, I can scram. I know how to take a fuckin’ hint.” He muttered that last part, beelining to the door with his hat yanked low. It occurred to Paul, then, that John Lennon might be rather sensitive.

“Wait, John -” the sound of his name stopped him. “I meant I forgot Jane was up for the week. Stay for dinner, why not?”

John tipped his hat up, so Paul could see his eyes. Cheeky, Paul picked up his songbook and shook it. “You promised to give me songs a look-over. You’re here until you do, so either y’have dinner, or y’don’t.”

He wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but he didn’t want John to leave. Being in the star business, Paul knew all about the way charisma worked, knew a thing or two about how to make a girl sulk himself, but John’s attention really was like a fishhook; it bled a little when withdrawn. Last two times they’d met, he was left with an itch, kept him buzzing and buzzing. If John wagged off now, in a snit, it’d drive him insane for the rest of the night. 

John’s face softened slowly, almost shy. “Aye, s’that how it’s gonna be, Ali Baba?”

Wrong thousand night, but Paul played along. He pointed to the floor, stylishly. “Oh great and wise genie, I command you to stay for dinner!”

“Your wish is my command, Master McCartney,” John swept into a deep bow, so agile he could’ve put his nose to the floor like that, probably. “But that’s two out’ve three on the record. Best make the last one count.”

He raised his head. Paul didn’t realize how long they were staring until he caught himself tearing a strip off the nail of his right-hand ring finger with his teeth. “Alright, John,” he nodded, knowing that they were both thinking about the same thing.

John nodded back. “Alright, Paul.”

Jane had an expression on her face like she had Thoughts on that exchange that she would keep him guessing on for a while depending on how the next few hours went. Paul wished she’d get it over with: he was completely out of his depth here.

Impossibly, there was no floundering those first few hours. Jane spent one in the kitchen prepping a roast. She liked to cook, the way Paul didn’t keep a cleaner - well, not _exactly_ the same way - and sometimes he helped her out, this thing they did: playacting at marriage. 

Why, why, why were these horrid thoughts plaguing him? Oh, how _awful_ a thing, to have a bird who’s so convenient as to be a girlfriend when you want it, and a wife on the weekend? _What about this is driving you batty_ , he wondered. Lately, their arguments were lingering around him like a cloud of smoke, clinging to his sweater, stinking up his hair. He didn’t like to feel this way, to be annoyed with someone in a manner that last more than one night. Usually, he could write his frustration out in a song, fluff it up a bit with _goopy strings_ , and he and Jane would be right as rain again. But he’d been writing about other things lately.

John rifled through his books: vocally judgemental, appraising in the way he let Paul into his warm side-eye glances. Hour two, Jane served them ice wine from a decanter and got off her head enough that she sang the _sha-na-na-na-nas_ in ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ along with them, laughing un-prettily into Paul’s shoulder at his and John’s tipsy attempts to comically top each other’s falsettos. Turned out John had been to art college - no word on whether he finished it, he slid up and down the fretboard of his past with a mysterious and evasive elasticity - so he had a thing or two to talk to Jane about that went over even Paul’s head. The sort of pre-conceived notions one develops when you’re taught the intelligentsia party line. He’d sod off school for music too soon to learn them by heart.

“I think it’s good to have an outsider perspective,” Jane said, neatly slicing her beef.

“Right, ‘cause it’s all a load of steaming horse shite,” John agreed, stuffing a cube of meat into his mouth. Jane clearly couldn’t take stock with the way John expressed things, even when they were in line with her thinking.

“Paul told me you’re having trouble selling your work,” she inquired politely, invisibly strained. “He was incredibly impressed, you know, I was surprised he didn’t come home with a painting.”

“The one I want’s not done yet,” Paul said, smiling to himself. John looked at him from across the table - subdued in lavender and yellow, dark blue jeans, the red in his cheeks augmented by the rosy stained glass jeweling the top row of the kitchen windows - unreadable, but clearly intrigued.

“If it’s contacts you need,” Jane continued. “Paul and I are very connected. Why don’t -”

“Jane -” Paul’s hand was around her wrist before John’s eyes twitched, rest atop the cool, silver vein of the bracelet he’d gifted her the Christmas before last. 

But John laughed it off - or at least badly pretended too. “Don’t bother,” he barked, pouring himself another glass of wine. He’d been going at it faster than the food, which was making more of an artistic journey ‘round the circumference of his plate than to the gullet. Paul, two fingers into the whiskey, could hardly criticize. “I’m blacklisted anyway,” he announced, spilling the wine.

“Right,” Paul remembered. “For tryin’ to sell th’ Indica a,” he swayed on his elbows, so he could make a highly un-serious hand gesture. “- _real piece of art_.”

“No, no, that’s why I’m not allowed _inside_ the joint,” John got all the wine down in one go, adam’s apple bobbing with the lazy canter of a buoy. “I was _already_ blacklisted.”

Jane capped the decanter. “The directors are so open minded,” she pried, “I can’t imagine what would have them ban an artist.”

“Well,” John laced his fingers together and cushioned his chin there. “It was rather minimalistic, y’see: a jug of piss.”

“How big a jug of piss?” Paul asked immediately.

“Like what y’make wine in, big enough you can stick your arm in -” John motioned up to about two-and-a-half inches above his elbow. 

“All of it, yours?”

That question had him ear-to-ear again. “Mostly. I had some help.”

Paul quirked a brow, unimpressed. “That it?”

“There was a folded note attached to the bottom of it. Eventually, the piss was gonna errode the ink, so you only had limited time t’read it.”

“The impermanence of existence,” Paul snorted into his clasped palm, and poured another inch of whiskey. “Couldn’t you turn the jug over?”

“Nah, I painted the bottom black.”

“So the only way forward is through,” Paul couldn’t hold it in any longer, the laughter. “Th-through the piss -” he was doing that snorty laughter, the kind boys do when talking about sex and there’s no birds around, a laddish affect he’s tried to shake around Jane. But he can’t help it when John’s cackling along with him. “Lemme guess, it read... _NO_.” Remembering the ladder at Yoko Ono’s November show.

John’s eyes were flickering wine-red. _Y’get, McCartney. You get it, you get it, you get it._

“- how do you expect to find patronage if you don’t take it seriously,” Jane was saying, and Paul could see the spell break in John’s gaze. One of the things that Paul loved most about Jane was that she spoke her mind like a man. However, she also had the bad habit of _pushing_ things like a man would, for the sake of it. The ballast rolled right out of the room and smashed through the hull.

“I told ya, that had nothing to do with it, luv.” John replied with false candor, snatching the cap off the decanter to polish down the wine.

“I can’t see how it didn’t.”

\- and they were quickly taking on water.

“Y’don’t know a thing about it,” John said darkly.

“And it’s not really our business,” Paul offered. Jane frowned, likely wanted to point out that blacklisting was a big deal, but mercifully she appeared willing to drop it.

John was still frothing up to something, tapping a restless heel on the cherry-wood floor. He glanced back and forth, weighing options, then said: “It’s nothing to do with anything I did. S’all um,” frustrated, he fished out his cigarettes and lit up at the table. “Immigration issues.”

Jane watched him, expectantly.

“It’s, like, why I’m here in the first fucking place, right-o?” John waved his cigarette. “‘Cause I found out I was a UK citizen, eh, otherwise why would I be wastin’ my time slumming around this _miserable, fuckin’, backwards_ , rock fulla fascist sheep-fuckers?”

“You’re homesick for New Zealand, I take it?” was Jane’s diplomatic contribution.

“It rains a bit less,” John answered in a drag of smoke.

“Why not go back?”

John slammed his hand on the table, open palmed. “Haven’t I told ya enough, woman? Jesus!”

“I’m only -”

“Why d’you ever fucking _care?_ You obviously can’t stand the sight of me - what’s this now, do you wanna know what’s _wrong_ with me, then? Is that it? How it is that I’m _like this_ , ‘cos there _must_ be somethin’ wrong with me that I’m squatting in a rotting tenement and you’re sittin’ pretty on that silk cushion you were born on, yeah?”

Jane looked at Paul, gaze wide and incredulous. Paul was still watching John from one eye, and missed whatever it was she was trying to get him to say.

John - who put his cigarette out on the lip of Jane’s heirloom decanter before dropping it inside: “Wanna know what happened?”

No one said anything to stop him from going on.

“Me pap’s a fuckin’ crook, is what happened,” he snarled. “Turned out I wasn’t supposed to be in the country, he took me there illegally and eventually, the Gov found out. So they fuckin’ kicked me off the fucking island, luv! _That’s_ what _fuckin’ happened!_ ”

“Have you been able to find your mother’s family?” Jane wondered carefully, still trying to salvage the conversation until it was ended in absence of Paul’s response. This, naturally, was the sort of question Paul would never think to ask. Jane assumed it neutral territory.

John’s whole countenance shut off: curtains closed, lights out, audience’s gone home. “Ooh, yeah, I tracked ‘em down, sweet as pie, but they didn’t want me either so now I’ve got nowhere to go. That answer your question about what’s _wrong with me_ , Miz Movie Star?”

Staring steadily at John the whole time, Jane tipped the decanter and fished the cigarette stub out with a dessert fork. “Yes, I think it does.”

“Well _la di da_ and a _tip top of the evenin’_ to you then, Madame!” John whipped to his feet, sweeping a hand as he went, sending his glass shattering to the floor. He wasn’t quite shouting, but the room contracted under the weight of his sudden fury. “Did you get a _good, long gawk_ at me, luv? I hope it was _good for you_ , darling! Hope that’s was a nice piece’ove atrocity tourism to get you off tonight, ya posh, pig-nosed cunt!”

John grabbed his coat off the chair and stormed out of the kitchen. The front door slammed shut a moment later, rattling the plates in the cupboard.

“Shit,” Paul said out loud.

Jane was shaking her head in the void of kitchen. “Paul,” she began.

“I’m sorry.” 

She blinked at him, composing herself. “Why? You had no idea. You’ve only met him, what, twice?”

Didn’t he, though? Didn’t he know? Jane was rising, a smudge of spring in her striped yellow jumper and white stockings, to fetch a broom. Paul fumbled to his feet, running over the last few minutes of conversation. He was certain - instinctively, under the skin - that none of that had had _anything_ to do with Jane.

“Where are you going?”

Not that he could tell her that, when John had been so rude to her. A terribly complicated situation. He had one arm in his coat, half-way to the vestibule, when Jane called his name again.

“Paul,” she repeated, standing at the mouth of the hall. “Don’t bother going after him.”

“He was my guest,” Paul said, automatically more or less. He was already thinking down the street, to where John could’ve disappeared to. “Better make sure he’s alright to get home.”

“Are you being serious?”

He grabbed a scarf, slipped into his shoes.

“Really, Paul? You’re going to bring that man around again?”

“Jane -” she had a canny instinct for choosing out the most inopportune time to kick off a fight. He had a feeling if he didn’t catch up to John Lennon right now, he would never see him again.

“What’s been going on with you?” Jane asked, leant against the doorframe with her arms crossed. “Ever since Christmastime you’ve been acting completely mad.”

That was an overstatement. He’d been loose and jolly over Christmas, in fact, with the first positive coverage he’d received from an American rag ever tucked under one arm. “Jane, why do you have to argue -”

“I’m not arguing, I’m telling you -”

“You always pick the worst -”

“You want me to spend more time here, but you’ve taken up dope -”

Not this again! When had his Jane become so close-minded!? “I’ve told you, it’s no worse than having a drink or tw -”

“And bringing around people like that -”

“Jane -”

“Paul you _didn't know anything about him_.”

“ _Jane_ -”

“If you want me to stay -”

“Listen, we’ll work out it later, okay?” Paul said, firm, hand on the doorknob.

“We’re talking about it now.” He could hear her house-shoes clicking in the hallway. “Let him find his own way to the train.” Paul spun around and used a tone with her that he so rarely dipped into that it sounded almost like someone else.

“I _said_ :” and he snapped the door open too, ice crackling underfoot but not breaking. “We’ll _talk it out later_ , Jane.”

She stood her ground, but went no further. He left her, standing at the junction of the stairs and the vestibule, and jogged off down the chilly street, clutching his peacoat shut with one hand. He found John not far from the house, huddled beneath a street-lamp, trying to light a fag against the wintry rasp of the night air. Paul came up to him, draped John in his shadow and clasped two hands round his lighter to shield the flame. 

John had his spectacles hooked into the neck of his shirt, so he had to squint to see who it was. “Fuck off,” he growled when he did, tearing away to keep uselessly flicking the flint over and over again himself. “If you’re here to defend your lady’s honour, I’m not known to apologize for anything, so break me nose and be off wit’ ya already.”

“I came to make sure you were alright,” Paul explained calmly. He took a sideways step so that he and John were face to face again. One thing at a time; now that he was the one standing in shadow, he could see that John’s eyes were red from stifling tears. He held his palms up again, although John was still peering at him suspicious-like. “Could tell we hit a sore spot back there.”

John’s face drained - of anger, of colour, of bluster. “Ah, y-yeah… yeah.” He finally lit the smoke; inhaled, breath and hands shaking. “The whole situation’s, it’s because…" a long pause, the smoke coiling around them in a silky corkscrew, and John's words just as fragile, so delicately ephemeral. "- me mum, she’s passed, y’see. And I’m not really -” he shook his head. “I can’t talk about it, mate, I just can’t.”

Paul warmed his fingers ‘round the ember of John’s cigarette. “No wonder,” he said quietly. “We’ve got the same sore spot.”

John stared at him in discreet awe, and it started crawling out, hesitantly - that apprehensive, unaffected smile from their pitch black sojourn in the bath-tub. _Yes, a true sensitive_ , Paul confirmed. Sensitive Artist, John Lennon. _Am I appreciating Van Gogh in his time?_

The thought made him laugh.

“What?” John snapped, instantly defensive.

Paul reached into the pocket he saw John store his joint in earlier and plucked it out. “C’mon,” he invited, voice and eyes droopy. He couldn’t go home for a spell anyroad, not until Jane cooled off. “Let’s have a wander.”

The story was long and complex, and somewhat alarming in the details John chose to omit, but Paul was never one to pry with anything but a scalpel; or, gentle massage when necessary. As a lad, John explained, he convinced some older bloke to steal him off to Liverpool so that he could live with his mother, and when he got caught they sent him on back to New Zealand, but then his father got arrested on unrelated charges which revealed John’s illegal status, so the Kiwi feds sent him on back to the Queen’s Land (top-side).

“The family doesn’t want anything thing t’do with me, in ‘case I’m ‘Like Alf’.”

They’d stopped to huddle against a bus shelter, on a wind-cutting suburban street with rowed stone-fences and those skinny, little trees that shivered all winter long. “Shouldn’t they give you a chance first?” Paul pressed their arms together, seeking warmth. The stub of the spliff was sputtering out on the concrete between them.

“They did, in their understanding of it.” John slumped against him, tilted his head so that his wispy hair was tickling Paul’s neck. “After Julia sent me back, it was with a college fund, yeah, that old Alfie couldn’t touch.”

“And you went to school?”

“Right, but I didn’t -” John tensed up and made a resigned noise. “Your little girlie’s not gonna let you alone unless you tell her why I got deported, eh mate?”

“I won’t tell her,” Paul promised, because he got the sense John wanted to tell him anyway.

He looked away, a jerk of the neck, but he didn’t move at all. “I got meself thrown into an institution,” he admitted. “That’s where I was when they found out about me birth certificate.”

Paul nodded, but didn’t say anything. He’d known people who sent family members away to institutions, but never anyone who came back out of one. Perhaps that explained his relationship with Yoko Ono - didn’t he say the same thing about her?

“Did you hear me?” John’s voice was bladed.

“Yes.”

“A _mental institution_ , McCartney,” he hissed, pulling away from the shelter with a dramatic lurch. He pointed to both temples. “For the problems in _me head!_ ”

“Gathered that part, already,” Paul retorted with a smirk, but one that he intended for John to share. The wind shrieked down the cobblestone corridor, pelting them with wet leaves and spittle from the street puddles. 

“Aren’t you scared of me now?” John asked, small and hoarse and so upsettingly sincere. “Even a little bit?”

Paul shook his head. “Why would I be? If I was like you, they’d put me in the madhouse too.”

“Yeah-huh? Like me how?”

“Honest.”

John ran out of steam, for good this time. Gliding as if on ice, he took a step forward and brushed Paul’s bangs out of his face. A leaf tumbled from his knuckle, but he kept going, tracing down the arc of Paul’s cheekbone, coming to rest with his thumbpad in the divot of his chin and his fingers on his neck. 

“Who are you, Paul McCartney?” he murmured. “You understand everything I say.”

The street was quiet, and so they stayed like that for a long time, John's thumb stroking the space beneath his lip.

The idea that lit up: Paul quashed it immediately, a cockroach under a bucket. But he let it thrill through him; the feather-light fever, the blind tumbling of the chest, a hiccup in his breath when he felt the resistance of John’s callouses scraping through his stubble. This was what made John Lennon different from other people he’d met: Paul couldn’t stand to be off-balance with anyone, but with John he wanted to be surprised, delighted in this dizzy round-a-bout. Anything could happen between them. Things that he can’t even bring himself to _imagine_ imagining could happen between them. It could happen right now.

John’s hand jerked away as a lorry roared by them, headlights about the size and wattage of a prison spotlight. “Y’should, uh, get on back,” he rocked on his heels. “Before your dindin gets cold.”

Your bird, too.

Paul nodded numbly, palms trembling on the frosty metal of the bus shelter’s rusted frame. He couldn’t feel the cold through the vibrations under his skin.

“I’ll see ya around, eh Paul?”

It wasn’t a brush off. Paul felt it - the fishhook retracting without a drop of blood. John shot him a salute, promenading backways with one hand in his pocket and a fag dangling from his mouth already. Paul saluted him back, _around and around, up and down the spiral staircase._

He whistled his new song all the way home, heart tripping on that missing stair every step he took.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Mellow Yellow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQNBQI3UDag&ab_channel=DonovanVEVO)  
> [Masanga](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MYk1ovh5-s&ab_channel=MonkeyD.Sound)  
> [Whole Lot of Shakin’ In My Heart (Since I Met You)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfOnYPYDpWs&ab_channel=thegreatmarkjohnson)/[(Come ‘Round Here) I’m The One You Need](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zsC5Kr1onc&ab_channel=Stinopsy)  
> [Do You Wanna Dance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVff7TJzc-Q&ab_channel=60s70sTheBest)  
> [Baby, Let’s Play House](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac1RcaoKn-M&ab_channel=ElvisPresley-Topic)  
> [Tutti Frutti](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO9kNFf3kRg&ab_channel=LittleRichard-Topic)  
> [Brown Eyed Girl](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfmkgQRmmeE&ab_channel=VanMorrisonVEVO)


	3. ( B2 ) ‘The Virgin’ (London, 1967)

A rosy Thursday in early May, Paul was knocking on John Lennon’s window in uneven staccato, whistling new notes between the beats. The day was muggy and perfumed; all pink and yellow and nubile with spring kindling the season, the early flush of summer’s arousal - and there was a warm breeze rustling his newly snipped hair: music in the streets, music in the air, music on his tongue.

John tore the window open snarling and swearing, but went all fish-eyed when he saw Paul, who greeted him with a wink. “Howdy pardner.”

“Long time no see, stranger,” John replied, sounding far more successfully American. Then, in his normal accent: “Thought I might’ve scared ya off.”

Arms crossed, hips cocked; he was determined to play it cool. Was this going to be the song and dance every time they met? Paul rolled his eyes and clambered into the apartment without invitation.

“Hey! Hey, hey, hey!” John made a show of trying to shove Paul back out the window, but it was feeble, performative. “Whatever happened to havin’ respect for a man’s private property!”

“You’re a squatter,” Paul pointed out. “And ‘sides - thought you didn’t believe in all that.”

“In all what?” John asked loudly, broad and nasal, picking the inside of one ear. He was tromping around in a house robe and socks, with not much on underneath. Paul checked his watch: it was 4PM.

“Aren’t you a, um, y’know -” Paul trailed off, not certain where he’d developed this impression. John kept cleaning his ear. “- a Communist?”

“No, mate!” John yelped. “I’m a _nothingnist!_ ”

“Like… a nihilist you mean?”

“Fuck off with that - I don’t subscribe to any ideology, cuz, it’s all a crock a’ shite far as I’m concerned. I’m only interested in the truth.”

Paul admired the way John managed to look artful indulging in such bathetic bohemianism, his spotty tartan house-coat slipping from one shoulder to show off a scattering of freckles. “How’s my painting going?” He peered into the studio, which was yellowed by the late evening, spilling out in a butter-soft bar through a slit in the curtain.

“Ehhhhhh,” John said, noncommittally but for a very long time. “Gotta wait for inspiration to strike, you know how it is.”

Not really, Paul thought, his problem was that he couldn’t get his head to stay quiet. He’d put out ten LPs a year if there were enough hours in the day the record everything he thought of. “Better hurry up. I’ve been talkin’ you up in some high class circles.”

The tone of voice he said this in was deliberately light, as to not give anything away. John seemed to have a bug up the arse about this angle of his artistic career - the one in which people actually looked at his art. He appeared to lack a basic ability to arrange the circumstances in which such a thing could happen. Most of it was personality-related.

Ah, to be the man who gets Van Gogh a talent agent.

“Aye, you put in a good word with the teenies and the bored house-fraus, then?” John gathered his robe, gliding it up the shoulder with one hooked finger, and reached past Paul to yank the window shut. His breath washed over Paul when he pulled back, closer now, close enough to -

\- to brush a wet leaf from his hair, Paul thought, his jaw tingling along the path of John’s thumb two months past, on a night nearly opposite of this one. He was addled by the scent of mint gum and pot, two weeks - maybe three - since he’d last had a spliff, and John’s hand on the sill was caging him between the window and the broken water-tank, his pupils already blown wide, inkblots bleeding through the page, smelling mossy and unwashed and thoroughly stoned. A fierce craving burst in Paul’s gut; a rupture, more like, between the stomach and chest, that trembled all the way down to the fingertips and suffocated him for a few seconds. When he exhaled, it was so shaky it came out as a sticky-mouthed whimper.

He cleared his throat and ducked around the water tank, “- among others,” he retorted smoothly, as if nothing had happened. Less a ballast, now - more like a game of table-tennis. Fucking _hell_ , did he need a joint.

“Imperious Prima, on a golden afternoon?”

“Secunda too, of course.”

“Right-on, I can always abide a little nonsense in the late day. Who else?”

“Robert Fraser,” Paul added casually, taking a lean on the pantry island, legs crossed at the ankles.

“Groovy Bob, huh,” John didn’t get it. “That’s not how it goes.”

“No, you git, I talked you up at one of his to-dos.” Paul made a big show of getting his cigarette pack out to hide his aching, stupid grin. He was self-conscious, about letting John on to how much meeting him had changed his perspective, but approaching things with the same gusto John did Yoko Ono’s apple has proved an infallible life philosophy. Since he’d taken it up, the Americans love his music, Groovy Bob is complimenting him on his open-minded but critical eye, and Jane has started to see a few things his way. He’d always been capable of this; what was with all the waiting around?

“You _what!_?” John began stomping across the flat. “McCartney, the fuck is _wrong_ wit’ -”

“Oh shush,” Paul brushed a hand through the air dismissively. “I didn’t mention you by name, so don’t lose your head about it, John.”

“Kinda hard not to _lose me head_ about it when I never _had me head to begin with_ , mate!”

Now he was just being melodramatic. “All’s I said was -” Paul crossed an arm over his stomach and toyed with his bottom lip, feeling very clever. John was standing in that way he did, his hands on his hips and elbows out like protractors. “Not even said - just _implied_ I’d discovered some bright new talent. Y’know, a true outsider.”

“Oh, so you were teasin’.” His house-coat was hanging open, showing the valleys between his ribs, lost in the shadow of the green terrycloth. There was something about the way John’s shoulders sat - like he was a man meant to have more meat than that between those bones.

Paul averted his eyes and tapped a cigarette from its packet. “Wouldn’t quite say that…” He meant it, in fact.

“‘Course you were, it’s all ya do.” There was an edge to John’s tone, like the dark bite in unsweetened chocolate. Paul twirled the cigarette, and wondered how John could make a joke like that, as if _he_ were the one hungry for approval here. “That,” John went on. “- and you’re a social climber.”

“Why not? S’no harm in making important friends if you’re being genuine, I figure.” Paul shrugged, and dipped to light his fag.

“Wait,” John croaked, voice suddenly strained. “Paul - don’t move.” And Paul, hungry for approval and with an instinct how to get it, did as he was asked. Even stopped breathing for a few beats. Through his eyelashes, he saw John reclined against the back of the chaise, reaching for a sketch book and charcoal. A thrill lit in Paul’s toes and shot up; he’d been painted before, for all those chintzy EMI compilation LPs when he was a boy and only singing half his own songs, but never by an - ahem - _artiste_.

“The muse becomes the musee,” he _teased_.

“Keep your head on your shoulders, there, mate,” John teased back, looking up and down from the pad as he sketched Paul’s pose. “It’s um, the outfit, yeah?”

Paul examined himself: a trim silver suit with matching turtleneck and felt shoes, warm-toned, cuffs done up neatly at both wrist and ankle.

“The silhouette... -” John’s arm whipped down, then east. He lift the charcoal and glanced up. “... s’it’s compositionally satisfying.”

Holding the gaze was making Paul’s eyes boil in his skull. What were they talking about, really? “I was at a photoshoot,” he explained, quietly, around the filter of his cigarette. “For me - um, my new single.”

“Another already?”

“Mmm hmm.” It was a strain, with his head tilted down and his hands cupped ‘round his mouth, but their eyes were connected like magnets. “S’called ‘Waltz in the Park’.” John flattened his eyebrows. “I know what it sounds like, but it’s on purpose.”

One last swipe of the charcoal, and John turned the page. “Y’can light it now,” he said. “But don’t go anywhere.”

Paul lit the cigarette and slipped away his lighter, leaning against the counter on one elbow. “It’s s’posed to sound like an old timey tune for the first verse or so, but then,” he tapped ash into a discarded mug. “Well, you’ll have t’hear it yourself.”

“I suppose I’ll have to,” John agreed, neutral, sketchpad perched diagonal on one-knee. “Stay like that. But, er, go back on your foot a bit -”

He didn’t have to tell Paul which one. Paul eased down on his left heel, so that he was lounged against the counter with his hip out like the hero in a Cowboy film, hand slung lazily across his mouth, hanging from his bottom lip, cigarette dangling between middle and ring finger. His first manager told him early on that he had a natural sense how to pose alluringly, which was news to him, the chubby little dork from Allerton. _That went straight to your head,_ Jane laughed and hit him with a pillow when he told her about it. Boys like you aren’t supposed to know.

“And your arm -” John was making lines, but his eyes were still charting up Paul’s body, so sluggish and heavy-lidded they might as well’ve been hands grabbing up his inseam to fit him for a suit. Adjusting hips, gently lifting one elbow; could almost feel the ghost of fingertips turning his chin so that he and John were staring at each other dead on, a sun-stained curtain of smoke separating them.

“Issat all you came here to tell me?” John asked, apropos of nothing.

“Huh?”

“To hurry up with your painting? You swung by after your photoshoot to check in on it?”

“No -” Paul shook his head.

“Don’t move.”

Paul snapped still. “I’ve got my first evening free in a while and thought you might want to grab a drink.”

_Skritch skitch._

“- or go for a wander ‘round town. A cinema flick, a gallery.”

“What’s this? Your birdie throw you out over our last jaunt, McCartney?”

“Oh, nothing like that.” Paul smiled secretively, to himself. He and Jane had gone through a real barnstormer the next day, all right, but two weeks later in Scotland they’d come to a few happy ultimatums. “But she’s not ‘ere tonight. Right now, _Monsieur_ Lennon, I’m all yours.”

John didn’t have a thing to say about that.

“We could get stoned and listen to American records, I’m not picky mate.” Paul, as always dealt with uncertainty by forging forward. “We are mates, yeah? Or did I catch ye on a bad day.” Leaning hard on the scouse in his accent, because John seemed to be endeared to it - all those Northisms and carelessly constructed sentences.

John was hiding behind his hair. “Oh, yeah, that’s it eh - I got a deadline -” over his shoulder, an Olympia suitcase typewriter sat on the floor, surrounded by scraps of writing, an empty box of puffed cereal and a half-drunk cup of coffee.

“I can come ba -”

“Told ya not to move, Paulie,” John scolded. Paul inhaled sharp; an obedient son’s instinct, but also the childish nickname rankled through him. John had this twist to his lip, though, like he intended it that way. “Lookat me now, yeah, with your chin down -”

John tilted his own face down to demonstrate - one finger on his chin, the other on his throat. Unconsciously, Paul mirrored his motions and his breath caught at the pressure from his own finger. John licked his thumb and dragged it up the page, “- your legs apart, like that,” he added and Paul felt something like the indent of that thumb settling into the inside of his knee to shift his stance.

It wasn’t like being fit for a suit at all, it was the opposite - a tailor seeks to project an image; an artist wants to get at what’s underneath.

Paul took a drag off his fag, not sure if he wanted to, or if it was just the best next move to take in the game; John’s eyes wrapped around his wrist. “That’s good…” John murmured, under his breath, in a tone of voice that Paul had himself used in his life, but certainly had never heard directed at him before.

It was all a bit much, so Paul asked: “What’re you workin’ on?”

That cheshire grin of John’s went from ‘sly’ to ‘naughty’ so fast he almost regret asking. “Y’sure you want to know?”

“It’s just work, isn’t it?”

 _Whoosh_ went the charcoal on the paper. “Yeah. Well. So, okay: this one… it’s about an artist -” he lift the sketchpad so that it hid the bottom of his face, “- who finally meets his muse.”

Paul’s chest contracted. “Stooping to autobiography, huh?”

“Hey - I gotta turn in one’ve these a month! There’s only so many ideas in the world, mate! Half the characters I come up with are based on th’ dock cats I feed out back.”

“Tom, the alley artist,” Paul played along.

“Meets his house-trained muse -”

“A house-cat, the muse is?”

“S’gotta be, otherwise where’s the conflict in the story?”

“So it’s a tale of corruption.”

“They all are, aren’t they?” John chuckled, his pencil doing lackadaisical dips and curves as his eyes crawled up Paul’s thighs. “Tom Tom plies his little darling with booze and opium -”

“Opium?”

“It’s a period piece,” Lennon explained, _dash, dash, dash_ on the sketch. “The muse is naive to the wicked ways of the art world, our artist’s got to weave a web, so to speak, by spinnin’ him a tale. The young muse-to-be’s never done a drug before, and he’s so off ‘is ‘head when the artist slides a hand up his thigh and says ‘come to my parlour’, that...”

Paul took a shivering drag off his cigarette. “It’s like the spider and the fly…” Lennon licked his first two fingers this time, and walked them up the page in uneven staccato, before caressing the damp charcoal into deeper meaning.

“Once Tom gets the daft git alone, he keeps up with the absinthe and the whatnot, and starts t’ply ‘im out’ve his clothes - like, y’know: _‘oh dovie, I’d love t’paint you, show me the lovely expanse of your collarbone, luv, your milky pale skin, I’d love t’sketch ya, darlin’_ \- ah, McCartney, turn like this now, yeah?” John twist his wrist to demonstrate. “And on like that, until the muse is shivering naked in the moonlight. Then, the artist goes along with unveiling his studio.”

“What’s in the studio?” Paul asked, fighting the natural mental image that was forming of it: a dilapidated flat, bathed in ephemeral pink and yellow, stunk of rot and coffee, plucked out of time like an alternative universe. An affair that could be contained in a glass bubble.

John’s dark eyes were on him, the depth of a loch at night, things moving underneath you can’t see and so you can easily imagine to be ancient. “There’s a fresh canvas waitin’. Tom Tom tempts the muse back, all silky-like, gets him flat against the canvas…”

Lennon walked two fingers along the top of his sketchbook and let them slowly splay open. Paul hitched his elbows on the counter and eased back, ciggie dangling from his lip and a knot of anticipation caught in his throat.

“- and then -” John exclaimed with a gleeful flourish of the charcoal. “-he oils ‘im up and sees how many paint-brushes he can shove up his arsehole!”

If asked, Paul could not possibly describe how he felt. Amused, relieved, disappointed, and the only one of these emotions which he understood was the first, so he focused on that. “Do blokes really get off on that?” he wondered, suppressing laughter.

“Must be, ‘coz they pay me for it!” One last swipe, and he shut the pad, tossed it aside. “Right, you can do whatever you’d like now.”

Paul kept smoking, for the security of it. “Should I,” he stared at the gluey floorboards. “- bugger off?”

“Look, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s true, about the deadline. But, uh, I’ve got this thing I’m expected at later -”

“A ‘thing’?” Paul inquired, almost lusty. What sort of social engagements was a man like John Lennon being invited to?

John’s hand shrugged up under his hair, and he shook it a bit, glancing away. “S’mostly an excuse for the most pretentious wankers in London t’get high, fuck, and show off how many obscure political tracts they’ve read since last ring around the fucking daisy chain. But I figure you might find that kind’ve thing novel -”

“You’re right, I would.” Paul was trying to hide that his eyes had lit up. A true _Bohemian_ soiree, very 1889.

“- it’s not revolutionary or nothing, but there’ll be an installation from Hapshash -”

“Hapshash and the Coloured Coat?”

“Yeah, who the fuck else would I be talkin’ about?” Paul ducked his head. Ah, right, how provincial of him. John seemed more charmed than judgemental, however: “You really like that shite, don’t you?”

“The Avant Garde stuff? Sure, I love it.”

“Well, son,” John grinned. “I’ll take you to the place where all the _real radical_ snobs lurk. The set who won’t take an invitation from those posh art tourism friends’ve yours.”

A plan to put a spring into anyone’s step. “How long d’you need to finish up?”

“Uh - an hour n’ so, I wager -”

“I’ll hang ‘round here, then,” Paul said, firmly. John had spent that whole time bossing him around, it only seemed fair. “ _And_ you’re gonna dress me up.”

“Am I?”

“Uh huh. Don’t wanna show up lookin’ like a bloody magazine cover, do I?”

“What a problem t’have,” John mocked. “To be so pretty n’ perfect, Paulie dear.”

“Shuddup and lend me a shirt, would you?”

John’s eyes tracked him like a hunter as he forged into the flat like he belonged there. “McCartney, you,” he tsked, up and down and chirrpy, like a music-box. “You, you, _you_ …”

“Me,” Paul smiled back.

\--

John lent him a shirt.

Paul was grateful for it when the party’s atmosphere hit him like a brick one step into the vestibule: thick and sticky as a slice of cheesecake. John’d been light on the venue details. _Is it a club, or a gallery?_ Both, he’d not-explained. Something about a layabout Bastard with a loose chequebook, a Russian exile with loose morals, and a Daily Mail scandal - _“Y’know, the usual”_.

 _ _“__ Eh, eh, eh!” John was shoving through to the hall, knobby fingers tight around Paul’s wrist. His glasses were fogging up from the press of bodies in the coat room, and it was a balmy eve outside if there ever was one. Paul caught sight of them together in a smudged mirror as they passed by: him, in a lace-front button-up under his suit, so sheer his arm-hair showed through the gauzy fabric when he pulled it on, a yellow scarf with blue trim pulling it shut at the neck. John’d tossed a cup of water on his head and shook the bangs out of his slicked 'do and Paul thought that he looked quite tragic and romantic like this, with disheveled hair and the shadow of his beard having gone past five o’clock hours ago. John was in multi-splendour bohemian glory as always, pink-and-plumb florals tucked carelessly under a red jacket, spruced up with accents of gold and lime. Paul wondered about John’s wardrobe, which was both chic, and worn thin at every edge.

People in the hall were already shouting ‘Lennon!’ and ‘how dare you show that mug ‘round here again, mate!’ before they muscled past the door-frame. Paul was jostled aside by a new arrival as John got pulled into conversation, and took refuge on the second step of the spiral staircase; looked up into the smokey depths, heard discordant, ambient music playing on a skipping turntable, husky giggling from behind the curtain ‘cross the hall.

“Excuse me. Are you Paul McCartney?” a girl, couldn’t be older than seventeen, was asking - twiggy and brunette, in a tasseled skirt hiked up so high her legs went on forever. Paul took a bit too long around her knees weighing the situation and John wheeled onto the stair to answer for him.

“No, he’s an impersonator I just met. Quite good, innit he?”

The girl couldn’t figure out to take it seriously or not, her pupils were filling the whole iris. “My name’s Jimmy,” Paul said, offering his hand. Looking rather disappointed, she accepted the handshake and wandered upstairs, swaying like a sunflower in the breeze. Paul had to actively resist the instinct to follow the movement of her short skirt all the way up, which was why he noticed the way John didn’t spare her a second glance. His eyes were on Paul’s waist, and he reached beneath the flare of his jacket to excavate the absurdly expensive bottle of scotch he slipped in there earlier.

 _“You know I’m wealthy,”_ Paul’d protested weakly in the store, pawing John off him with no real venom. _“It’s just for the thrill of it darling,”_ John whispered back, one hand inside Paul’s coat and the other clutching the lapel, swaying back and forth together between the towering shelves of the liquor cabinets like they were slow-dancing. They were in a similar position now.

“Jimmy, is it?” John gibed, using Paul’s coat to tug himself up onto the first stair, so they could hear each other over the music.

“Actually, that James tosser’s the one who’s famous. I’m just Paul.”

“Nice t’meet ya, Just Paul,” John smiled at him, boyish and completely sincere. The moment elongated, nothing but John’s eyes, and the velvet undergirding of weeping strings dripping down the stairs, and the way light danced on a wall when it was filtered through string beads.

“Is that Basil Kirchin?” Paul wondered, finally placing the composition on the turntable.

John yanked him off the stair. “Let’s get some drinks in you, Jimmy, me mate!”

The halls of the disused flat churned prismatic in all the senses: the clash of competing melody intertwining from one arm of the house to the next, the assault of flyers and stapled tracts papering everything like wallpaper, pattern soaked bohos and beat holdouts in suffocating black yarn, artists with their slick French and American styles dashing filtered cigarettes into the chunky, glass ashtrays littering every surface, a dash of military coat, those kids who thought of themselves as Revolutionaries.

John tugged him into a longue done up like a gentleman’s pool hall - bar and billiards included, bohos lounging in fraying armchairs passing back and forth a spliff, a turkish hookah lurking beneath a swamp of pink smoke in the dark corner of the room, party guests taking and leaving booze as they pleased. The click, clack of the lacquered billiards balls, glasses clinking, the low murmur of conversation and lazy, stoned laughter: no turntable in sight, but the room sang from the floor to ceiling, some dreamlike wonderland lost between the carefully catered and tailored excess of Robert Fraser’s aristocratic lifestyle and the punch- table at a Christmas dinner back home.

John deposited them at the far end of the counter - an appallingly Edwardian brick of cherry-wood and gold filagree, overflowing with bottles and glasses, and glasses which had been turned into ashtrays.

“Fizzy scotch, luv?” he asked, cracking the scotch open.

“Make it a double,” Paul scanned the room, then shot John a wink. “A triple if you’d like.”

“You want t’end up in a tabloid?”

“Why not? I’m trying to shed me reputation here, y’know.” He set one elbow on the counter and lit a cigarette, watching the party from the corner of his eye in the room-length mirror inlay on the wall. Directly behind him, a young couple was necking on a busted loveseat, hands up and down beneath fabric in places not normally acceptable in public. Down the counter, John was engaged in enthusiastic conversation with a shaggy-haired man dressed in wide-bottomed French pants and a fur-lined vest, as he mixed their drinks with the precision of a grammar school lad ducking out behind a warehouse during lunch period.

Paul tapped his fag into one of the ash-stained tumblers and when he looked up Yoko Ono was staring at him in the mirror.

He spun on polished bootheel to greet her - her sleek black dress, cocked beret and leather knee-highs, long-hair pulled back to show her glass-cut cheekbones, face pale and subtle as a reflecting pool. She held out a cigarette, expectant. Ever the gentleman, Paul lit it for her.

“So John got you,” she observed, words slid along a ribbon of smoke. There was an affectation to her accent that had her speaking without punctuation, but it wasn’t a question anyway.

“More like I got him,” Paul replied, lighter tucked back inside his coat.

“He have you paying for his room and board yet or what,” she asked. “Have you taking care of him? Just like Thomas?”

Paul shook his head. “The other way ‘round, actually - I’ve got him doing me a commission for free.”

“Aye, Yoko!” John thrust himself into the conversation, quite literally - swinging his hip into the space Yoko was vaguely occupying to put himself between her and Paul. “You crafty Baba Yaga; surprised they let you in here after makin’ a travesty of yourself at the Indica!”

“What’s wrong with the Indica?” Paul wondered, hoping he didn’t appear defensive.

“Most everyone here thinks it’s launderin’ your art up through the fascist system. All that shite about capitalist reclamation and on, an’ on.”

“S’no joke,” interjected John’s long-haired friend. “It’s happenin’ to the Yanks already.” And now that Paul listened closer, he sounded like he’d spent time overseas too.

Yoko was unphased. “It’s foolish not to use every tool at your disposal. I can get big here, I can get big in America, it doesn’t matter.” She adjusted her pose, passing her cigarette from one hand to the other and re-crossing her arms. “I know who I am. When I get where I wanna be then I can do what I want.”

Paul watched the multi-colour lamplight glide over her, and started nodding along. He was the same way; the problem is that he had no idea who he was.

Well - except that he did, didn’t he? Always had. There was another problem.

“The rule in London’s that the less art you sell, the more real you are.” John’s long haired friend was using the edge of his ID-case to chop something into a fine powder. “Want some?”

“ _Chur_ \- Christ yes,” John said, like he’d been waiting for someone to ask him that all day. He eased half a wrinkled one pound note from his tight jeans a centimetre at a time.

“By that standard’ve judgement, Johnny-boy, dove, darlin’, you’re the most successful artist in the Empire.”

“Yeah mate, soon I’ll be so obscure I’ll be paintin’ me trash at the bottom of the bloody English Channel.”

Paul followed after, two steps, chin bobbing over John’s shoulder to see Mister Bell-Bottoms slicing white powder into lines - three, four, five. “What’re doin’?” he asked.

“Cocaine,” John explained, sniffing overloud, pressing down one nostril then the next. “S’like a prellie, yeah, but doesn’t make you act completely mad-like.”

There it was again. “Prellie?”

John ducked forward to snort a line, throwing his hair on the way back up. “Preludin! Amphetamines! Like what they did in the wars.” He hocked and spit mucus onto the stained Persian rug. “Love ‘em on the mainland, y’know? All’ve France is hopped up on it like it’s the fuckin’ Opium Wars in their nightclubs, mate. ‘Cept opposite. Cocaine’ll amp you up twice as good without the consequences.”

“Oh, I know what cocaine is.” Paul was making some mental calculations about whether or not he wanted to try it. He snatched the torn bill from John and twirled it into a slim straw with his guitar-trained fingers. John whistled, impressed, and he did it again when Paul knocked back the line without complaint, hiding the twitch of his eye, the hint of a wince, in a flawless head-toss. _Fuck_ , it burnt: an ice cream headache and snorting tea down the wrong pipe both at once.

“Ya’ve made it into an art, Macca.”

Better than ‘Paulie’, that one. More importantly: “When were you in France?” he rubbed his nose, ignored the burning that shot up behind one eye.

The question pulled the grin off John’s face, a curtain snapping shut. “I -”

“That was with Thomas, yeah?” provided the friend with the drugs, oblivious to the drop in temperature. It was the second time Paul had heard that name in about as many minutes.

“Who’s Thomas?” he wondered, and you’d think a bomb’d gone off.

“He was John’s patron,” Yoko said calmly, but with subtext, as John’s hand clamped around Paul’s wrist - bit harder than he’d done before, almost tight enough to hurt. He rounded on Yoko, switch flipped from ‘stunned’ to ‘furious’.

“Shut it, Yoko,” he hissed.

“Until recently,” she finished, tapping her cigarette off.

“I mean it! Don’t you dare say another word you slit-eyed, cunt; not in front’ve Paul, or I swear - I fuckin’ swear to God -”

“Go ahead,” she dared him airily. “Get yourself exiled from somewhere else, make more enemies. It’s your karma, John, you always acting this way.”

“I’m not a fucking chauvinist, Ono, I ain’t afraid to hit a chick if she fuckin’ deserves it.”

“Lennon -” John’s friend set a hand on his back, but got an elbow in the gut for his effort.

“And you too, Vin, not a goddamn word about Thomas from you eitherways, else I’ll break a fuckin’ bottle across your pretty face, eh?”

Paul had the foresight to grab his drink. “Thank you for the cocaine, Vin!” he called back politely as John dragged him away.

Through a curtain of oriental pashminas and silk, John pulled him into the back stairwell - the narrow, creaky corridors once meant for servants. Bathed in bloody light spilt from a stolen Exit sign above the back door, in the buzz of the bulb, John stared at the floor and Paul memorized the way the shadows turned his face into flat planes of light and dark. It was crowded as an outhouse and hot as a kitchen, cool evening air brushing their ankles from the gap beneath the broken door. Above, the house was vibrating, music turned up too loud just out of range, the walls alive with a bassline heartbeat. John was shifting from foot to foot, fiddling with something in his pocket.

He took out a cigar, and shed of its paper packaging with careful, deliberate movements.

“Nicked it earlier,” he explained, apologetic gaze over the spectacles. “‘Bout on the same quality as the scotch. Wanna split it?”

John sliced the sealed tip open with a pocketknife, then wordlessly set it between Paul’s lips. Paul was holding his glass with two hands when it happened, so there was nothing to be done about it.

“Y’know how to light a cigar proper, right? Can never manage it meself.”

Paul nodded. Slowly. Patiently. He was pretty good at it, though not particularly practiced. John flicked his zippo on low, and gently pinched the cigar between thumb and forefinger. The sensation of the tobacco leaf scraping against his lips as John gingerly rotated the cigar above the flame was just like any sensory input one is not themselves in control of: which is to say, that it was stimulating something in Paul’s chest, in his fuzzy fingertips.

“Thomas was... a mate of mine,” John began quietly. “Me flatmate - y’could put it that way. I -” he cut himself off abruptly, and raised his chin to look Paul in the eye like he was being forced to do it at gunpoint. He was afraid, it was like, of what he’d see. “Remember how I said it was an older bloke who took me to Julia? When I was a boy?”

Paul nodded again, running his thumbs along the rim of his glass. John wanted to tell this story, and didn’t want him to say anything while he did it.

“Yeah, so that was Thomas. When I was -er, starting Third Form or so I’d skip off school almost every day and sometimes I’d dress up like a Scarfie and go down to the college library. Thomas was teaching English there and caught on to me pretty quick, but I convinced him not to rat, an’ we struck up a kind’ve -” John trailed off, lips trembling, but expression glacially focused on the cigar. “Inhale, luv.”

Paul sucked in a gentle breath, damp smoke and spice.

“He helped me out sometimes,” is how John decided to describe it. “Like - Thomas, he’s t’one who wrote me a letter of recommendation when the college didn’t wanna take me, ‘cause I flunked half my classes, yeah? But even before that, he got posted to Lancaster and I begged him t’steal me off with him, so I could be with me mum, an’ what d’ya know - the dizzy arsehole actually did it.”

The zippo clicked shut, loud as a gunshot in the heavy space between them. Paul took a proper drag off the cigar this time, his whole head filling with the ephemeral, cedar taste of cured tobacco. John turned his hand to grasp the smoke between his second and third knuckle, caught it between the ‘V’ of his fingers and slid his hand down the cigar until they were flush with Paul’s lips. He let them drag on his mouth as he lift the cigar, nails catching on the delicate skin when he pulled away.

“Did he help you out the second time too?” Paul asked quietly. “After the, um, the institution?”

John bowed his head: ashamed. “Mmm, y-yeah. Like Yoko said, I was livin’ in his attic apartment until recently.”

“What happened?”

“Well -” John snort, arrogant as a badly trained horse refusing a bridle, and passed the cigar back. “He got posted to some fancy French Institute and I didn’t fuckin’ want t’move to France - and anyroad, why should I? For him!? Fuck that.”

That one sentence slingshot all over the emotional spectrum, so Paul decided to accept it as was until further elaborated on. “Are you feeling it yet?” he asked instead.

“Hmm?” John’s inquisitive hum came out more like snarl. His head whipped up, eyes feral, hands making fists. Then he got it. “Oh, the dust? Nah, er, yeah-nah. I mean - probably, mate, but I can never tell when I’m in full swing. You?”

Paul’s heart was being squeezed so tight it was a butterfly in his throat, and everything was glowing, just a bit, around the edges. He put the cigar in John’s mouth and pulled him towards the stair.

“Fuck Thomas,” he agreed capriciously. “You’re here with me, yeah?”

The realization rose on John’s face like the dawn and he let himself be led. _You,_ his eyes were saying. _You, you, you._

_(The First Hour)_

“Are you fucking composin’ right now, McCartney?”

“Yeah - yeah, come ‘head and listen -”

Paul groped at John’s coat and tried to hum his new song at him, but it just didn’t sound right without the harmony.

“You’re the one wouldn’t shut up about finally seein’ an authentic _Hapshash_ collection -”

“See, it’s like -” the only way he could explain was to trace the colours - what he was seeing in the colours - as he hummed. John grabbed him by the arms and wheeled him about before he could rub his hands all over the Installation by accident.

“Woah there, Paulie, lad, y’can’t just go around touchin’ anyone’s art.”

John kept on holding him; his grip was tense, tempted to hold on, desperate to let go. It was possible to hear that sentence another way: “y’can’t just go around touchin’ _anyone’s_ art.” Paul chose not to.

“I know,” but then. “Why not, though? Why shouldn’t art be touched? Why shouldn’t we trust each other to… enough t’touch each other’s art?”

“Now you sound like Yoko.”

“I wonder though… could y’make music you could touch?” He tried to imagine it: wouldn’t that be like a piano anyone could understand? An instrument that looked exactly like the sound it produced? No, it was deeper than that. “What? Why’re you lookin’ at me like that, John?”

John kept looking. “We haven’t put anything stronger than scotch and a line in you, darling, you’d be a real menace if we did.”

I don’t need to, Paul thought, _I don’t need it to be weaved for me, to be able to see a Wonderland _.__

__Someone was tapping his shoulder. “Are you Paul McCartney?” they asked._ _

__“No,” Paul said automatically, before even turning around, so lost in notes he wasn’t even seeing them. “I’m an impersonator.”_ _

__“James McCartney,” John added._ _

__“No, no - I told you, Jimmy’s the famous one.”_ _

__“So you’re... James?”_ _

__John shook his head, had been shaking it already, smiling like a clown, both index fingers swiveled at Paul: “no, no - he’s _Paul_.”_ _

__“That’s right,” Paul grinned back. “Just Paul.”_ _

_(The Second Hour)_

“I don’t think I’m like that.”

“That’s what all Geminis say,” tittered Sally - or was it Sammy? Sammy, yeah; Samantha the Fortune-teller - from under her fried orange and brown hair, chipped-polish nails drumming the top of her tarot deck - she was telling him all about his star sign. “Every Gemini I meet, that’s exactly what they say.” Paul wrinkled his nose. “Doesn’t mean you’re duplicitous, lovie, just that your eyes are so open they’re liable to fall out.”

“I’ve seen it meself,” John put his fag out in her ashtray, overflowed it onto the paisley tablecloth. “And he’ll tell you _himself_ \- _‘don’t trust me pretty face, sir, I’m actually a right scoundrel underneath it all’_. Let him in to milk the cows, and he’ll be stealin’ your daughters before the sun’s finished coming up and ask ya what the problem is, Sirrah?”

Paul crossed his legs and frowned around his cigarette. “I’m not doing it on purpose, y’know, it’s just me personality.”

“Ah ha!” John threw his hands in the air.

“That’s t’point dove,” Sammy chewed, tobacco, turning another card over. “Six of Wands, reversed.” She looked up, alert, eyes green as long-boiled peas. “Watch out for this one, huh?”

Paul followed the hook of her gaze towards John’s profile.

“Libras and Geminis, when they get together -” she smacked her palms together. “Air signs, you know?”

“No, I don’t know,” Paul said, but he was looking at John, and John’s eyes were sliding towards him too, a lazy prowl, like the slinky guitar jangling from the turntable, yellow, orange, yellow, blue. The music was turned up in that way, where you heard it in different parts of the body: bass in the feet, guitar in the throat, voice - oh, you hear a beautiful voice at the back of your soul.

_‘Don't even know what I'll say when I find you’_

_‘Call out your name, love, don't be surprised’_

“A Libra and a Gemini together’s like a candle burning at two ends.”

_‘It's so many miles and so long since I've met you’_

“- and you’re both holdin’ a stick of TNT.”

_‘Don't even know what I'll find when I get to you’_

Around and around, the woman on the record practically playing her chords on a spinning wheel. Paul could hear the reel spinning tight between him and John, _click, click, click,_ it’s going so fast that his head’d been turning around and around too. Or - the sensation of pressing your thumb to the surface of a newly lit candle to feel the give. The wax was melting away between them.

_(The Fifth Hour)_

“Well, what’s the way?” Paul asked, of John’s shoplifting habit. “T’do it, y’know, without getting caught.”

“No real ‘way’,” John shrugged, resting a hand in the small of Paul’s back to lead him down another hallway - air blue with marijuana, and the floors slick with broken glass and vodka. They were floating between rooms, between conversations. “S’about taking an opportunity, looking casual.”

His pushed Paul up the stairwell in the same motion he slid a cigarette case off an armrest, practically under the nose of its owner.

“Mostly,” he plucked a fag from the case and lit it. “It’s about not carin’ if you get caught.”

Later, fixing his hair in a mirror, Paul found the cigarette case tucked in the inside pocket of his suit jacket, in place of his own smokes. He examined it - gold lined, and inlaid with genuine ivory and precious gems. An antique; maybe an heirloom. Paul was torn between being irritated and -

\- and what? He asked his reflection. John Lennon - leaving incriminating evidence as a prank? Or bringing him a gift like an alley cat dragging a dead rat to your door. Or like something else entirely.

Paul set the cigarette case back where John’d swiped it, but not before stealing three fags to replace the ones John had nicked from him.

_(A Half Hour Later)_

_“She was just seventeen -”_

(- and they were doing it the right way: the way y’could _dance_ to, which is how he coaxed John onto the keyboard in the first place -)

_“If ya know what I mean -”_

_(Eight Songs After That)_

“Are you _actually_ Paul McCartney?”

He and John looked up in unison.

“Nah, he’s a -”

_(Sometime Past Midnight)_

John: magisterial sprawled in a plushy, high-backed chair - what Henry VIII must’ve been like before he got fat, for people to let him get away with what he did. Paul sat on the chair’s arm, one knee pulled under his chin, reclined leg propped up on the opposite arm, a bridge across Lennon’s lap.

“How long…?” he was asking blearily. He couldn’t remember what the conversation was about before, he and John parked behind the speaker under a blanket of lumbering drums and acid guitars. The music painted such a vivid landscape he’d almost forgotten the rest, and it was just him and John Lennon alone in a field of kaleidoscope tulips and neon fireflies.

“Could go on all weekend, luv.” John’s cheek was laid in his palm, beside Paul’s nervous, twitching foot. His other hand was dancing tuneless patterns up and down Paul’s leg as he gazed at him through the thicket of his eyelashes.

Midnight, midnight, ten past, one o’clock; he kept losing track of time. He couldn’t stay here all weekend.

“... your bird expectin’ you?”

“Tomorrow,” Paul said, checking his watch. Half past one, in fact.

“You wanna split?”

Paul chewed his lip, rolled his chin back and forth on his knee a few times.

“I’m not keepin’ ya prisoner Paul, bleedin’ Christ mate.”

“That’s not it.”

“Then what is it? Why’re you still hanging around, huh?”

John asked that last time too, what his ulterior motive was. Beneath the veil of smoke and sweat, the parlour’s wine-coloured shadows were hiding a treasure trove of fascinating, eccentric stories and yet the only person who’s opinion on the New York Scene he was interested in was John’s.

Because he was still high, Paul said: “It’s ‘cos… you’re so interesting, John. Can’t you tell I keep makin’ excuses to talk to you?”

John stopped drumming his fingers.

“You say stuff to me that’s like tangled yarn, s’no fun to go home before I’ve finished unravelling it all. What? What?”

John was chuckling low in his throat, in disbelief. “ _You_ , of all people, sayin’ that t’me…”

“What?” Paul said again.

“Every time I see you... I think your eyes are a different colour.”

“Oh, that’s ‘cos they are -” Paul pushed forward so that he was under the half-lit chandelier. “They’re not green or brown, see, they’re both.”

It was John’s whole face that was disbelieving now.

“I’m serious, John, every conversation we have it’s like -” _F minor, ascending scale_. “- going up a spiral staircase, y’know, like - I have _no_ idea where it’s going , but when we get there, it’s always the right place. It’s like… like...”

He didn’t know what it was like, because they weren’t there yet.

Blinking slowly, Paul realized that John’s hand had slipped up under the hem of his pantleg. “I have no idea where we’re goin’ either,” he admitted, tumb stroking the inside joint of Paul’s foot. The jolt that touch sent from ankle to thigh made Paul nauseous, and horribly sober, and so many things, and John’s eyes were on him like an owl stalking a squirrel.

Paul sucked in a sharp breath and rolled off the chair, landed wobbly-legged, tugging at his scarf with one finger. “I-” he stagged backwards, nearly barreled some bloke over and didn’t even say sorry. “I have’t piss. Be a minute.”

Nothing about the situation was alarming once he was no longer in it. Paul didn’t remember stumbling to the loo at all, he was thinking so hard about not thinking, and he came to zipping himself up in front of a faded poster protesting the war in Rhodesia. He pushed out of the toilet to find a girl cutting cocaine on the sink - short and shapely, with chin-length blonde hair and a smart, two-colour outfit: painted-on black jeans, fluffy goldenrod sweater, offset with a silk scarf in matching autumn tones. She reminded him of the out-of-town college girls he used to lust after before he met Jane.

She did a line, then wheeled around and stared him straight in the eye. “Fuck me. Are you bloody Paul McCartney, mate?”

“No. I’m his twin brother.”

“Ah, well,” she shrugged. “You want a line anyhow?”

“What took ya so long?” John haruanged him a while later after Paul tracked him down again. He was on the far end of the parlour, where the mild evening rain was battering at a bay window, arguing with Yoko Ono.

“A bird offered me a line in the loo,” Paul explained slinging one leg over the arm of John’s chair. Whispering, he added: “- so I got her off just t’be polite.”

John rolled his eyes. “You’re really tryin’ for that front-page, McCartney.”

Paul winked, although to be honest her jeans were so tight they did most of the work themselves once he got his hand in there. Not the most satisfying encounter he’s had against a sink, but if he and Jane kept all their promises to each other, he’d have to stop doing this kind of thing soon.

 _‘Wanna find a room?’ She asked, cheeks pink, massaging her pinched nipple through the fabric of her push-up bra._ Paul considered it, briefly, but: no, no, I’m here with someone, he insisted; he needn't have bothered - John was holding court in his absence.

“England doesn’t have hippies. We have dissidents.” - is where the discussion resumed going, heedless of Paul’s arrival. There was a small crowd gathered around the poker table, Vin the cocaine bloke, students dressed like Communists, and a few older folks that looked to be from Yoko’s crowd.

“What ya _have_ -” John raised his glass. “Is an entire country of sexually repressed drunks an’ drug addicts. It’ll sink into the fuckin’ sea before the lot’ve you get a Revolution going.”

“What’s the fight about, then?” Paul wondered.

“The revolution will be in the mind,” Yoko Ono insisted, ignoring him. “ _In the soul_.”

“The revolution’s in me _fuckin’_ ARSE!” was John’s rejoinder.

“It could be in your ass John, it could be anywhere. It doesn’t prove anything to say this. The revolution is a concept, it cannot be limited.”

“Right, okay,” Paul slid off the chair when he realized no one was paying him mind and drift from the circumference of the conversation, sunk into the dense mesh of the music. Maybe it wasn’t so much that John was questioning his ulterior motive as that he was sick of having a plus one trailing after.

Paul longued against the turntable cabinet, listened to the spine of the song with his whole body, examining the album cover: this cool looking American band, in dressed-down, sloppy slacks and sunglasses, like the acts that used to crash and burn at The Cavern.

“Not one for revolution-talk, huh?”

Paul glanced up to see that John’s mate Vin and another bloke had come over to flip through the records. He shook his head. “Doesn’t seem t’have much of a point, does it? This group -” he showed Vin the sleeve. “They’re quite good, yeah?”

“Sure, mate. They’re with Warhol’s outfit, part’ve that whole new scene.” Vin lit a cigarette. “That’s what Ono’s trying to do, did you know that? Set herself up like England’s Warhol, with a finger in every biscuit.”

“She tried to shag one of the Rolling Stones, yeah?” Vin’s friend slapped the side of the cabinet, he thought that was so funny. “They just got a hit in America.”

“Uh huh,” Vin puffed out. “But _Creem_ slagged ‘em off already. Said they had plastic soul, so who knows if that’ll go anywhere.”

“I always thought British soul was a bit more rubbery,” Paul commented lightly. No one else got the joke.

“Anyway,” Vin continued. “I dunno if she was trying to fuck him, eh, but she thought she could hang the bastard on the hook for cash, for sure.”

“Is that what John did?”

Vin’s head snapped around to stare at him.

“S’that why Yoko hates him?” Paul wondered. “He said she thought he warned a patron off her.”

Vin’s friend started laughing.

“Sure, warned him off is what he did, John Lennon.”

“What? What’d he do?”

“... same thing he’s doing with you, no doubt.”

“Aye -” Vin’s friend slapped him on the back. “- but don’t take it personal, dove, he’s been off his nut since that thing with Thomas.”

“John’s flat-mate Thomas, y’mean?” Paul asked, because there were a lot of men in England named Thomas.

That earned him a raised eyebrow. “Nah, man, John’s lover.”

It wasn’t that his blood went cold. It was that it stopped moving entirely; quite a feat when the cocaine was turning Paul’s entire brain into a coiled braid of electricity.

“- Yanks are always sayin’ everything’s an FBI plot -”: a bystander at John and Yoko’s table. _Whatever_ they were still going on about.

Of course. It could have been a joke. No need to -

“Blimey hell, mate, he didn’t know. He came here with John and didn’t _fuckin’_ know.”

“Sorry, what? His lo…” the cockroach stirred. Paul forgot he’d put a bucket there. “-ver?”

“Not sure you can rightly call it that,” Vin scoffed. “S’was more like John shagged him for room n’ board, drugs and the like, whatever else he wanted. Led the poor old sod around by the willie.”

Paul listened from one ear, losing himself in the byzantine intertwining guitar lines melting down the walls.

_‘And what costume shall the poor girl wear’_

_‘To all tomorrow's parties’_

“Oh, Jesus Christ, near the fuckin’ end, when John was practically rentin’ ‘imself out as rough trade -”

“Would you stuff it down your gob, Chas? In front’ve ‘im?”

_‘She'll turn once more to Sunday's clown’_

_‘And cry behind the door’_

“Why should I!? Eh - mate? You even know what you’re doin’ here with John in the first place?”

“Not what you’re assuming,” Paul answered stiffly.

_‘For Thursday's child is Sunday's clown’_

_‘For whom none will go mourning’_

“Look,” Vin sighed, running a hand through his hair. “When Lennon goes after someone to make a point’ve it, _doll_ , he makes a fuckin’ point of it, that’s all he’s tryin’ to say.”

“Good thing that’s not what’s goin’ on.” He was sitting on the bucket now. If only he could exit this conversation before the thought found its way out.

_‘A blackened shroud, a hand-me-down gown’_

_‘Of rags and silks, a costume’_

“Thomas, yeah - any boy John went for, he made sure Thomas _knew_ he was screwin’ them. Do yeh even _get_ what I mean? Just -”

“ _VINCENT!_ ”

The turntable was still going, but one could’ve sworn there was a record scratch when John shot up in his seat. He lurched around in time with the rolling Indian beat, one hand dug into the cushion so tight his knuckles had gone white, and vaulted over the back of the chair. “Vin, you busted limey cocksucker!” he spat, grabbing a bottle off the fireplace mantle. “What the _fuck_ did I _promise ya_ if _you didn’t_ -”

“Shite -” Vin shoved Paul aside and tried to book it, but John caught him by the shirt and jerked him around. “ - stop saying _Thomas’s name_ with that _greasy cunt on yer face!_ ”

He smashed the bottle across Vin’s mouth.

“ _Holy shit_!” someone shouted across the room.

The bottle didn’t break in one hit, so technically John had not kept his promise. Vin bent like a kicked can, taking a table of lost jewelry and empty glasses with him as he crashed to the floor. John fell on him in a flurry of red and green velvet. Vin’s mate tried to pry him off and got backhanded with the butt of the bottle. The glass shattered on the second blow, crumpling Vin’s nose and digging a bloody ditch in his cheek that tore open at corner of his mouth.

“‘Orry, n’m s-sorry,” he was trying to apologize.

John’s hand was full of glass too, but he crunched it into a fist and used it to ground Vin’s face into the floor.

“John, c’mon now man -”

“Christ, mate, is that Lennon going off ‘is head again?”

Without thinking, Paul pivoted forward and grabbed at John’s jacket. He was jockeyed away at first, and someone else entirely tried to pull him aside - the second grab he made was around John’s neck, to grasp his lapels.

“John, John, hey there, Johnny,” he soothed. Vin’s blood splashed him cross the nose when John raised his fist. “John, it’s okay,” Paul murmured into the shell of his ear, and hauled him to him feet. “Shh, shh, he didn’t mean it, Johnny. There’s a lotta men named Thomas in London…”

John recognized Paul’s hands - the expensive cut of his suit, more likely - and his gaze cleared. Paul saw the fog lift: the knife of clarity cut through him. “Paul,” he rasped, fumbling free from his arms like a man lost in a snowstorm. “ _Paul_ , I…” He looked at his hands, covered in blood.

“I’d like to split now,” Paul said calmly.

“It ain’t like that,” John was muttering, “I swear it, Paul, it’s nothing like that.” There was no reason for John to protest this way, Paul hadn’t decided what to make of the situation at all.

No one stopped them leaving. Paul didn’t look back, at where Vin was having a hard time getting on his feet. As they passed by, Yoko Ono handed Paul John’s crumpled hat. Inside, were his missing cigarettes.

The night was bright and misty - moon a shiny coin through the moving clouds, pinning a spotlight on where John stopped to vomit behind a bin. Beside him, Paul was leant against the ginnel wall, hands in pocket and eyes lost in the rising fog. John sounded a mess, sounded like a jar of glass and teeth being tossed down a drainpipe, sniffling and chattering and hocking up everything he’d drunk that night.

When he was done, he wiped his mouth and looked up at Paul weakly. “Well… now you know I’m bent.”

Paul nodded slowly and said nothing.

“Bet you’re scared of me now.”

Paul shook his head. He was thinking nothing too. All the way back to John’s flat, he thought about absolutely nothing. They were lost beneath blue shadows, the dark night along the river. But rather than plug in the lamp, Paul put on the turntable.

“Care for a cuppa?”

“Yeah,” Paul answered without meaning anything by it. He thumbed along the records until he hit something new.

 _Fssh_ , the needle hit the vinyl, and from John’s shoddy cabinet speakers rose a dense organ choral - intricate as Bach, delicate as a crystal glass.

_‘We skipped the light fandango’_

_‘Turned cartwheels 'cross the floor'_

Paul cranked it as loud as it would go. The song filled the room like smoke, one of Chaucer’s tales set in the opium Wonderland of John’s saucy magazine stories.

_‘I was feeling kinda seasick’_

_‘But the crowd called out for more’_

John - framed in a burst of orange from the stove - was calling something from the pantry, but it was, of course, impossible to hear him over the music.

Paul turned from the light, and dropped himself on the chaise, arms tucked tight, one foot drumming ceaselessly against the creaky floorboard. _Crk, crk, crk,_ the music was deafening, but he could hear it in his heel, in his _soul_ \- in the sole of his heel, ha ha. He picked up John’s sketchbook and pulled it open to the most recent page.

_‘The room was humming harder’_

_‘As the ceiling flew away’_

What had he expected to see? To even formulate a joke here would be incriminating, somehow. The sketches were mostly straightforward - more pose than detail, a handful of Lennon-esque doodles that smartly identified the characteristics of his face and typical body language. His fingers lingered on the last page, where John had split the sketch into abstract fragments - mostly he was drawing the light and the smoke, but what caught Paul’s attention was the way John’s drawn his eyes: so deep, deep, _deep_ , smudged charcoal, stained and bleeding everywhere, an under-tow that pulls you to the center of the page.

Paul understood it so immediately he broke into a frigid, dizzy sweat: whatever it was that he felt when he and John looked at each other - John felt the same thing. Like he was underwater, but wanted to stop holding his breath.

Paul leapt to his feet, throwing the sketchpad like it’d bitten him.

He _felt_ like.

_‘She said, 'There is no reason'’_

_‘And the truth is plain to see’_

He -

What did he feel like? Being around John? Like his body was moving on its own and he was paddling against the current. He shut his eyes and thought about earlier, when he came in through the window, when John had him up against it, two inches away and his wrist brushing against Paul’s where they were both clutching the sill. It was hypnotic, John’s closeness, turning away was like breaking through to the surface. In the memory, he sinks down, puts himself there with the May sun baking the glass behind him, listens to the natural ebb and flow in the air between them. He slides back with a sigh, until he’s flat against the warm glass pane, and John’s hand slides with him. The robe slips from his shoulder and Paul reaches up to fix it, the heel of his hand ghosting ‘long the ridge of John’s collarbone. His palm goes next, flat into the divot of his chest, fingers trailing behind ‘til his hand comes to rest, nestled in the caverns between John’s ribs. In the memory, John’s breath grinds to a stop under that palm, and he whimpers. Paul’s fingers twitch in response, a scrape of fingernails, the ghost of a caress; the noise (he imagines, this is a fantasy he reminds himself) John makes is - it would do no good to finish the thought.

Then what? The record ended. Had ended. _Krrk, krrkl, krack_. Paul’s eyes snapped open and he discovered that he was biting his thumb so hard he’d burst the skin.

Then what? What _then_?

“Paul -”

“ _What_!?” Paul whipped around, drunken and harried, blood on his lip, a wild cast to his eyes and his cock twitching at half mast. He was crazed, jittering, holding in hiccups. The cocaine was still doing its work, in bursts and spurts, jumping up and down on a mostly-used tube of toothpaste. What had he really come here to do?

“Tea’s done,” John said meekly, oddly reserved, a chipped cup in either hand. He entered the studio, brushing through the curtain, its two ends parting around him in shivering, silver bands. Paul didn’t remember going in.

John set one cup on his easel, and handed the other over using two hands. His knobby fingers encased Paul’s.

 _Take the tea_ , said his mind very clearly, and rather rudely. Paul listened to the way the air was moving around him - between them - instead, and let it clatter to the floor. It shattered at John’s feet, an egg filled with steam, and Paul let John circle a hand around his wrist, thumb-joint dug into the tangle of nerves around the arteries.

“Yeah, don’t know why I bothered,” John muttered, more to himself, and then finally - _finally_! Paul thought - he touched him. Tugged him close and hooked two fingers between the second and third button of his shirt. He pressed their foreheads tight, but didn’t kiss Paul, not quite.

“ _The silver saxophones say I should refuse you_ ,” he sang softly. Paul felt the gravelly purr in it go right through him, it was like a hit of grass, the way it made him want to slide out of himself.

“ _John_ ,” he murmured, and John brushed their lips together. “John...” he said again, for the joy of it. It felt like he was doing something wrong, how much he liked saying his name.

“ _The cracked bells, n’ washed-out horns_ ,” John serenaded, flattening his palm in the dip of Paul’s stomach, long fingers brushing the base of his ribcage. He began walking him backwards, one step every beat, “- _they blow into my face with scorn. But it’s not that way, I_ -” the rest of the verse was lost into Paul’s lips, gentle and firm - a hint of teeth when John’s mouth caught in the dry patch on his bottom lip, and nicked at it. He licked away the blood there too, held Paul firm by the jaw to keep the kiss chaste when he tried to chase after his tongue.

With two more steps, John had him nearly on the wall and Paul was so hard he was kind of pissed off. “ _John_ ,” he keened, and not cutely this time. John laughed at him - low and liquid and seductive, and infuriatingly full of it.

“Oh, McCartney,” he sighed, still singing. “ _I want you_ ,” he licked up the vein in Paul’s neck, “ _I waaaant you_ ,” and bit him where it curved under his jaw, just behind the ear. Paul gasped, and curled his fingers in John’s shirt, twisting him closer. “ _I want you so bad_ ,” he was growling now, teeth grazing the shell. “I really did think y’were liable to put me back in the madhouse…”

“How so?” Paul hiccupped, embarrassed at the way his voice sounded lighter than the dust on a moth’s wings - all cracked in his throat.

“I’d go mad, if I’d had to see you -” John dropped his hands to Paul’s hips and pulled them taut. “- if I had to see ya _one more fuckin’ time_ , Paul McCartney, without getting to touch you I was gonna lose me whole fucking _head_.”

Paul wasn’t sure he could categorize the noise he made as either a _‘laugh’_ or a _‘whine’_ , when he felt how aroused John was, pressed up against his inner thigh. There was no way to change his mind about this now, no matter how fast or far this went. Y’know, like a bird can back out if you get just one hand in the bloomers, but if you convince her to roll them down, it was pretty much a done deal. That thought sent a vomit-inducing bolt of arousal through him, but also it was funny; he still had all his clothes on.

“You’re driving me mad _now_ ,” he hissed, hating that all he could do was buck his hips along helplessly as John ground into him in slow, unsteady cants. It wasn’t fair - John had experience seducing men. For Paul, this was like being a teenager all over again; he’d never had to grapple for control of a sexual situation before, and if he had, it’s not like he’d ever _lost_.

John shoved him against the wall and dropped to the floor, fingers hooked in Paul’s belt. “Wait -” Paul said, because that seemed like the thing to say, but it all happened very fast, his pants around his ankles and John’s giant, tree-branch fingers stroking up his calves, hooking behind his knees as John nuzzled his nose up the length of his cock. He took the whole of it in one motion.

One of Paul’s hands went straight to his mouth, to eat the noise coming out of it; the other braced the wall only to find itself lost in a puddle of wet goo. Paul threw his head back and heard a _squelch_ , felt the gloss of paint on the crown of his head. “John -” he gasped, his body gliding with the slick of the paint as he bucked into John’s mouth. “The… your painting…”

John’s answer was to grab a bruising handful of his ass and keep going. Paul’s knees buckled under his orgasm and he slid to the floor, bleeding paint behind him - blues and greens and orange, a psychedelic morass dyed into his suit, his hands. He trailed it through John’s hair, down his cheeks. John cradled his face so that Paul was looking him in the eye when he spit his spunk into his still bloody hand and rubbed it into the smeared surface of the canvass.

“See,” he chaffed hoarsely. “Inspiration.”

Paul was reeling, holding John’s face in both hands, taking in his wet, swollen lips and foggy spectacles. To see a man like this was -

He pulled off John’s glasses, admired the way almond-shaped eyes blinked against the moonlight before growing large and mellow. Nothing about it even felt sexual, what was happening between them right now. Rather: it seemed profound. Paul set the spectacles on the floor, picked up John's wounded hand and started plucking out the glass. “We should clean you up.”

“Yeah,” John agreed, but then he kissed him. And kept kissing him. Paul closed his fingers around John’s palm and wrenched closer, opened his mouth under the kiss; John licked into him immediately. “Christ,” he whimpered, twining his arms around Paul’s waist in a vicious noose. “McCartney, oh Paulie, don’t go home tonight.”

“I won’t,” Paul promised.

“Please, please,” he begged. “Don’t leave it like this. Let me take’ya to bed, luv, please.”

“Yeah,” Paul nodded. “I know, I am.”

“ _Come, come, come to bed with me_ ,” John sang, barely, some half-remembered tune from the 1950’s. And because Paul recognized it, he was laughing into John’s mouth, humming under John’s hands, sinking into John’s eyes.

“Okay, I will.”

\--

What Paul McCartney thought about love was that -

Well, to put it to a metaphor, it was like: everyone is chasing after something, right? And some of that is the _thing_ which you give to another person; and _who_ you love, is the person you freely choose to give it to. As long as you’ve got the kind of relationship where you’re not afraid of showing that to your girl -

\- to anyone, really. That’s what it’s all about.

Whatever it was that he and Jane were chasing with each other… whatever it is you’re usually chasing with anyone… that wasn’t what it was about with John.

John: in the golden morning, cranky to be awake with the dawn, naked under his bathrobe and unashamed of it, rolling a joint while the kettle whistled away on his wood stove. The flat stunk of chemicals, whatever it was John was burning - a couple of planks he didn’t bother scraping the paint off of. Paul was sitting on the counter, in his pants, socks, and one of John’s silky shirts, waiting for his suit to dry off the fire escape. Maybe for something else. What he was trying to find with John was deeper, more complex. Not like one of the girlfriends he kept when Jane was away. The comparison was insane.

“Penny for your thoughts,” John said, “But you’ve got t’fish it out of the piss jug.”

“I was just thinking... it’d be boring to have another love affair, y’know.” Paul was surprised by his own honesty. “D’you understand?”

John’s gaze, when he raised it, was serene, pleased, no danger of misinterpretation. In fact: he looked as if Paul had said exactly the right thing. The one thing he’d been waiting to hear.

“Yeah,” he echoed, setting the lit spliff between Paul’s lips. “I think I understand.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Abstractions of the Industrial North](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFR-h8zHE_k&t=407s&ab_channel=Nicol%C3%A1sGuzm%C3%A1n)  
> [Train Song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hswWRRk4vAo&ab_channel=VashtiBunyan-Topic)  
> [All Tomorrow’s Parties](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkDJcUCyjCU&ab_channel=TheVelvetUnderground-Topic)  
> [A Whiter Shade of Pale](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLi0gguAO9o&ab_channel=ProcolHarum-Topic)  
> [I Want You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iIS6ZZ9RVA&ab_channel=BobDylanVEVO)  
>    
> **a note about the worldbuilding:** without The Beatles, the "British Invasion" hasn’t happened, and so England is _not_ having the Summer of Love in 1967. Its subculture is more suppressed and volatile; kinda Thatcher-era-esque, with a lot more in common with the Beat Generation than the Hippies. The full global sociopolitical implications of this haven’t really been relevant to the story _so_ far, but it's there (that being said, I’d call this fic more “meta” than “well researched” lol).


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